Authorities planned to release more details about the case, the sheriff's office said in a news release, including the name of the victim and charges for the suspects, who have yet to be identified.
The woman had crawled nearly 100 yards — the length of a football field — to get to the road, where she had some chance of being seen by people in passing cars. Authorities determined the distance by measuring a trail of drying blood.
"You could tell it was so bad to where you just had to give her comfort," Richard Loadholt, one of the UPS employees who had been riding with three other men on Tesla Road around 2 a.m., told Sacramento Fox affiliate KTXL. Initially, he said he and his workmates thought she was missing an arm. "She fought like a soldier. Like a warrior."
The hilly, winding road where she was found is a popular alternative to Interstate 580 for people traveling between Livermore and Tracy, according to Bay Area news station KRON. It was also virtually deserted in predawn hours Monday. The area is so remote that the UPS workers had to send other people who had gathered at the scene to an area where there was better cellphone reception to call police.
When first responders arrived, they decided the best option was to airlift the dying woman to a hospital with an advanced trauma center. But as they tried to save her, investigators asked her questions. The most important one: Who did this?
"I've been around a long time, and I can only think of two to three times that I'm aware of in our agency that we've been able to get a dying declaration like that," Kelly said.
In the legal world, a dying declaration is a statement made by someone who believes they will be dead soon. It's an exception to the legal rule forbidding hearsay in court testimony, and it can hold tremendous sway in a case.
In this one, it led to arrests just a few hours after the woman was declared dead.
About 10 a.m. Monday, the two suspects were arrested at a home in Modesto, about an hour from where the woman had been found.
"We were able to act on the information from our victim," Kelly said.