David Romano, 39, of Warwick, who was driving a pickup truck, was the first of four drivers to hit a man who jumped off an overpass and was fatally struck by cars headed northbound early Monday.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

CRANSTON, R.I. — Whipping past in the high-speed lane of Route 95 early Monday, David Romano noticed a woman standing in front of a wrecked car in the highway’s far-right breakdown lane.

As he turned his attention back to the road — a split second, he said –– he saw “a large black mass” falling toward his car through the near-darkness just before 6 a.m.

He swerved, but not in time. “I heard a thump and a bump.”

Romano, on his way to work in Boston, was the first of at least four drivers to hit 38-year-old Karl T. Pernsley, who had just jumped from the Route 10 overpass.

Pernsley and his girlfriend, Alethia Gibson — returning from a job cleaning at St. Pius X Roman Catholic Church in Westerly — had hit a sign at the side of Route 95, state police said, crashing into a barrier that separates the ramp to Route 10 from Route 95’s travel lanes.

Pernsley and Gibson, 40 — who had moved to Woonsocket from the Philadelphia area together about seven months ago, and worked for the same cleaning service — got out of the car, a 1992 Chrysler LeBaron. Then, police said, Pernsley scrambled up the embankment onto Route 10 and leaped from the overpass into northbound traffic.

“Apparently, he was having problems in the last couple of weeks regarding things that had transpired in his past that had bothered him,” State Police Capt. Kenneth Marandola said Monday evening.

The resulting chain of accidents involved numerous cars — about 15, according to Kevin Battersby, one of the drivers who hit Pernsley — and closed Route 95 northbound for two hours, diverting traffic onto Route 10. Four people, including Gibson, were hospitalized because of the trauma of seeing what had happened to Pernsley, Marandola said.

Marandola searched for words. “It was carnage,” he finally said.

FOUR DRIVERS reported that their vehicles had struck Pernsley. Besides Romano, 39, of Warwick, and Battersby, 38, of West Warwick, they were Joseph Dasilva, 43, of Warren, and Delores Paolino, 68, of West Warwick. None was hospitalized.

Battersby, speaking from home around 3 p.m., said he saw that a car had crashed at the exit divider, and then he saw a man in the roadway. “I was able to avoid running him over,” Battersby said, but his truck’s running board clipped the man.

Battersby said he pulled off to the left, called 911, and then, seeing a gap in traffic, crossed over to the relative safety of the right shoulder. Thinking he had struck a man who had been thrown from the crashed car at the exit ramp, Battersby said, he “felt really horrible.”

More cars crashed.

“Everyone kept hitting and going,” he said. “Some people stopped. One woman did a one-eighty” after losing control of her vehicle.

“It was like something you’d see in a movie. I was just in shock.”

He said he gathered under the Route 10 bridge with others involved in the crashes. “We just basically exchanged stories over there.”

State Police troopers took their statements, and then they went to the Lincoln Barracks to complete written statements. He said he called his wife to tell her not to worry, and called in to say he wouldn’t be at work.

Marandola said Monday afternoon that Pernsley’s father was on his way to Rhode Island from Pennsylvania.

Paul Latraverse, Pernsley’s landlord, said he was shocked to hear of his tenant’s death. Latraverse was overseeing repairs at 109 Arnold St., Woonsocket, where Pernsley and Gibson had lived until three weeks ago. That was when they moved to a bigger apartment Latraverse owns, just a few blocks down the road at 267 High St.

Pernsley and Gibson had lived in the first-floor apartment at 109 Arnold for seven months, Latraverse said.

“He was a great tenant,” Latraverse said. “He was quiet. He always paid the rent.”

THE MORNING’S EVENTS shook Romano, the man who had first hit Pernsley.

Romano had been driving to Boston for his job as a grip on the Ben Affleck film “The Town.” His first thought was that what his Chevy pickup had hit “looked like a bundle of laundry.” He drove on north.

But at his usual “pit stop,” a Dunkin’ Donuts in Pawtucket, he couldn’t shed thoughts of what had happened. He drove back.

As he emerged from the Thurbers Avenue curve, he saw several cars “smashed against the guardrail.” And, more tellingly, there were bloody blankets spread on the roadway.

That’s when he knew he had struck a man, said Romano, who in his teen years had responded to fatal accidents when he helped in his father’s funeral home.

“I’ve seen car crashes of people that I went to school with, which were pretty horrific,” Romano said. “But not like this.”

Driving back home after talking to the State Police –– they’d released his truck, because this wasn’t a murder investigation –– Romano kept pulling over to the side of the road. He couldn’t go faster than 5 miles an hour, he said — his body was still too jittery.

“I have been shaking all morning,” Romano wrote in an e-mail to The Journal after he got home, “and cannot get the sight out of my head.

“I pray for his family and I pray for everyone, including myself, for making [it] out alive.”

With reports from staff writer Tatiana Pina

dnaylor@projo.com