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Persoonlijke gegevens Donna Jantina van Leeuwen 

• Zij is geboren in het jaar 1953 in Torrance, Los Angeles County, California (USA).
• Feiten:
• (overlijden) .

  bij de aardbeving van 1989 in San Francisco om het leven gekomen.

• (overlijden) .

  OAKLAND, Oct. 28— They were brought together by chance, by fate, by an act of God, some might say: 23 men, 15 women and a little boy. Strangers caught together in a terrifying moment as the earth's mantle shrugged, blithely shattering a fragile man-made structure, the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland.
  
  Few in the Bay Area had thought much about the road. It was just part of the network of highways that knitted the region together, routinely feeding commuters onto the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Suddenly on Oct. 17, a powerful earthquake turned the routine into the extraordinary. The cars that are as much a part of Californians' everyday lives as subways are to New Yorkers suddenly became deathtraps.
  
  When the rubble and dust had settled, 39 victims were extracted, lives lost to the whims of nature. The coroner's list was like a census report on the polyglot Bay Area: victims were Asian, black, white, Hispanic. There was a Palestinian, a refugee from Vietnam, Midwesterners, Easterners. Most were not native to the Bay Area: they had come for economic opportunity, for personal or political freedom, for the climate, the beauty. Most gave only passing thought to the dangers of earthquakes, or at least, wrote that off as a price of living in the Bay Area.
  
  Here is how the lives of 10 people intersected and ended on the Nimitz Freeway: Donna Marsden Hospital Administrator, 36 Born in Torrance, Calif. . . . daughter of a Los Angeles police officer . . . married, divorced and remarried . . . an administrator in the pathology department at the University of California at San Francisco . . . lived in Alameda . . . died at the age of 36.
  
  Like most people born and reared in California, Donna Marsden had adopted a casual attitude about earthquakes. She had taken the precaution of wrapping rubber bands around the knobs of the china cabinet in her three-story Victorian home in Alameda. That saved her china when the jolt hit on Oct. 17, but Mrs. Marsden died with four others in a university van.
  
  She boarded the blue and gray Dodge van every weekday morning, and again at 4:40 P.M. in San Francisco for the return home. That day had been no different, except that her husband had taken her to lunch to celebrate her promotion at the University of California at San Francisco. Later, the van traveled the upper deck of the Nimitz Freeway at almost the same time it did every day. Had the quake struck seconds earlier or later, Mrs. Marsden would scarcely have been affected, apart from picking up some fallen items at home.
  
  With her blue-green eyes and nearly floor-length hair wrapped in a large bun, Mrs. Marsden was striking, and she was known among friends for her sarcastic wit, keen sense of the absurd and, above all, a nurturing spirit. She kept hundreds of plants, two dogs and two cats. A favorite charity was the Starcross Monestery in Santa Rosa, which cares for children with AIDS.
  
  For two years she worked in the anesthesiology department as coordinator for resident doctors until being promoted to the pathology department the day before the quake. Colleagues said she exuded energy and self-confidence, exhibiting a directness bordering on bluntness. Her husband, Bruce, who designs and installs software for the International Business Machines Corporation in Oakland, said one of her greatest joys was fixing the Victorian house the couple bought two years ago, and she spent hours painting and papering the walls and fixing furniture.
  
  They knew earthquakes were a threat, but never thought much of it. ''We grew up out here,'' said Mr. Marsden. ''We tended to adopt a cavalier attitude. It's a fact of life out here. Every time there was a rumble, we'd make a joke when it quit.''

• Zij is overleden op 17 oktober 1989 in San Francisco, San Francisco County, California (USA), zij was toen 36 jaar oud.
• Een kind van Jan Frederik van Leeuwen en (Niet openbaar)
• Deze gegevens zijn voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 6 december 2015.

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