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After a nearly yearlong investigation, the city prosecutor’s office has declined to file criminal charges in the death of a 54-year-old ophthalmologist who was hit by two cars during an early morning jog on Kalanianaole Highway near Wailupe Beach Park.
Dr. Cynthia Timtim Soneda, a Kaiser Permanente doctor at its Waipio clinic, was killed June 19 apparently while trying to avoid a car accident scene near Wailupe Beach Park.
The prosecutor’s office said Tuesday that the case was dropped last month because there was no evidence of negligence on the part of the driver whose car initially struck Soneda.
Police estimated the driver was driving near the speed limit and was not intoxicated. Weather was not a contributing factor, the prosecutor’s office said.
Police said the chain of events began at 5:45 a.m. at Waa Street and Kalanianaole Highway when a 19-year-old woman driving a Scion traveling in the Koko Head direction on Kalanianaole Highway rear-ended a parked car.
Soneda then attempted to cross Kalanianaole Highway from the makai side, apparently to avoid the two damaged vehicles.
She entered a marked crosswalk fronting 5005 Kalanianaole Highway and was hit by a red Nissan Leaf, driven by a woman in her 30s from Hawaii Kai, traveling in the contra-flow lane heading town-bound.
The impact threw the jogger into an adjacent eastbound lane, and she was run over by a Chevy truck driven by a Haleiwa man, police said.
Soneda was valedictorian of the 1978 Kalani High School graduating class. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University. After receiving her medical degree at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine, she finished her ophthalmology residency at the White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles.