Woman who died in freak carpark accident was almost three times the drink driving limit

Victoria, 23, died in an unimaginable accident in a carpark in January – and now details of her freak death have been revealed by a coroner.

The university graduate who died in a freak accident after her head became wedged between her car and a parking toll booth was almost three times the legal drink driving limit at the time of her death, a coroner has recorded.

Victoria Strauss, 23, was killed after she dropped her credit card and accidentally hit her vehicle accelerator pedal while trying to retrieve it in January this year.

The Ohio State University graduate’s immediate cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, according to the coroner’s report, obtained by People on Tuesday.

Victoria Strauss, 23, was almost three times the drink driving limit when she died in a freak accident in Columbus, Ohio in January. Picture: Facebook

Mechanical asphyxia was also listed as a significant condition that contributed to her death, but was not the underlying cause.

No drugs were detected in her system, but the coroner said Ms Strauss had a blood-alcohol level of 0.221 and listed acute ethanol poisoning (alcohol poisoning) among their findings.

In NSW, a blood-alcohol level of under 0.05 is the legal limit for most drivers, however, in Ohio, the legal limit is below 0.08, making Ms Strauss almost three times the limit.

She died after dropping her credit card and hitting the accelerator of her car. Picture: Facebook

Security footage shows Ms Strauss dropped her credit card as she was trying to pay for parking inside the garage around 11.30pm on January 19.

When she opened her door to retrieve the card from the ground, she accidentally accelerated, according to the Columbus Police Department.

As the car moved forward, her head got stuck between it and the toll booth.

Police arrived at the carpark about six hours later and paramedics pronounced her dead at the scene.

She has been remembered as a ‘beautiful’ woman by friends. Picture: Facebook

Ms Strauss, who was originally from Florida, was remembered as “vibrant, beautiful and caring”, according to the New York Post at the time.

“She wanted to be a therapist; she was about to graduate grad school, she wanted to make a change in other people’s lives,” her friend Brianna Domaeti told local news station WBNS 10TV after the accident.

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