Really sad news. A good player and an even better guy. I know that stretch of highway 395 well. We used to use that route to get up to Reno for the Sands tourneys in the 80's and 90's. I saw one fatal accident there myself. A young Asian man who was solidly built (looked like a body builder), driving a small pick-up truck hit a full sized pick-up head on. I was the first one to get to his car and took one look at him and knew he was gone. Good looking young man too. I will never forget that. Like Jerry, he had fallen asleep on the long drive home and drifted into the oncoming lane of traffic.
There are several very dangerous roads in California (highway 126 comes to mind first) and you must use caution driving them. People get either sleepy or distracted and they are all two lane roads, with no barriers between the lanes. I just made a trip on highway 243 to Idyllwild, 22 miles up a curving narrow road to the top of a mountain 6500 feet up. Idyllwild is a real nice little village on top of the mountain. Great place to visit and stay for a couple of days, with lots of cool stores and good places to eat. On the way back down, with drop-offs over a thousand feet just off the edge of the road, some guy coming up in an old SUV came flying around a turn at maybe 50-55 mph (35 was probably a safe speed) and I saw his car leaning precariously over, tilting toward my oncoming lane. His right side wheels were nearly off the pavement. I moved over as far as I could and just slid by. Afterwards I realized that if his car had fallen sideways I would have had no way out, with only a fraction of a second to react. I was lucky that day! And so was my wife.