Questions and tears

She was going to show her twin sister a new spot she'd found along the Yuba River — a Sunday afternoon bike ride the family never finished.
Lucinda Gillis, 32, was killed when a driver, later arrested on suspicion of hit-and-run driving, DUI and vehicular manslaughter, struck her as she was about to complete crossing a street near the Wal-Mart in Linda.
"We were supposed to do a lot more things," her sister Lucretia Ann Boyman said Monday of plans the two had. "This is not right. This is so not right."
Identical twins — down to their teeth, Boyman said — the two had lived near each other all their lives.
Gillis' mother spoke Monday about her Bicentennial babies — her twins born in 1976. "I always said I had one for reach 100 years we were a country," Anita Simmons-Gonzalez said. She held a report card of Gillis when she was a student at an elementary school in Auburn before the two girls began at Placer High School.
Their late father, Michael Boyman, was awarded a Bronze Star for his heroism in 1968 as a Marine in Vietnam, and Gillis was a young woman determined to do the best for her own family, Boyman said.
"My sister was a soldier," Boyman said, referring not to military service but the young woman's commitment to her two boys, Dominic Robles, 12, and Michael Robles, 15.
Gillis was studying at Phoenix University and wanted to become an accountant, said family members who recalled their move from Placer to Yuba County so the boys would grow up in a small town.
Gillis on Sunday had ridden her bike behind her twin sister so she could keep an eye on Boyman's 3-year-old in a bike seat.
Boyman spoke about seeing her sister on the ground after the vehicle struck her, the helicopter that airlifted Gillis from the accident site at North Beale Road and Feather River Boulevard —and the hope her sister's injuries weren't fatal.
"I heard she had a pulse," Boyman said. "But she didn't make it,"
"You just have to love the people you're close to," Boyman said. "It seems like they're here one minute and gone the next."
The family plans to bury Gillis in Colfax in Placer County.
Andrew Louis Cornett, 24, of Linda, was arrested Sunday after allegedly fleeing from the scene, abandoning his pickup truck a short distance away and going to a neighbor's shed.
Cornett was on probation after his 2007 conviction for a felony DUI with injury. He had a prior DUI conviction in 2004, law enforcement reported.
Cornett was also named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit after a 2001 incident at Lindhurst High School. He drove a pickup truck through basketball courts on the campus and struck a player, fracturing the youth's ankle, according to the lawsuit.
His bail in connection with Sunday's arrest was $100,000, jail records state.
"He took my sister's life," Boyman said. "There better be justice."


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