FOSTER — Katherine O’Toole was kind of a workaholic. When she wasn’t busy with her children, she was doting on her patients at the Cedar Crest nursing home, in Cranston, where she worked as a certified nursing assistant. To blow off steam, she liked to ride her motorcycle.

O’Toole, 48, worked every other weekend and she had last weekend off. On Sunday as the temperature rose and the sun came out, she told her husband Brian “Let’s get out.” She put on her leather jacket and riding boots and got on her favorite bike, her silver, customized Indian Scout. Brian got on his Harley.

They rode their bikes to East Providence to Rogue Choppers, where she had bought her bike, and then to Scarborough Beach, said Brian, a welder at Electric Boat. “We had a great day. I’m so glad she got out on her bike,” he said, from the garage where he was showing off her bike. “That was her baby.”

On Tuesday night, O’Toole was killed in a three-car accident as she drove home from work in her Chrysler Sebring on Route 12 in Scituate about a half mile west of the intersection with Route 116. She was the mother of six.

The collision occurred at 11:23 p.m. Katherine was driving in the westbound lane on Route 12 when a Dodge Ram pickup truck driven by a 37-year-old man from Scituate going east, crossed the center line and collided with her vehicle head-on, the police said. The Dodge rolled onto its roof 400 feet away. Another vehicle, a Ford Taurus, driven by a 43-year-old Coventry man heading west, struck the Dodge, the police said.

The Scituate man was taken to Kent Hospital in Warwick for pain in his left ankle. The Coventry man was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with complaints of pain. The police are not releasing the names of the men citing an ongoing investigation, said Deputy Chief Stephen B. Lang. No charges have been filed.

Brian said that Katherine usually got home from work at 11:50 p.m. The couple lives in a wooded area of Foster where deer are often on the road and Katherine had hit three in the past. When she did not return, Brian thought she hit a deer and got in his car and drove down Cucumber Hill Road to look for her. But he turned back home after driving a mile thinking maybe somebody would try to call him while he was out looking for her. “When the police knocked on the door, I knew she was dead,” he said.

At the O’Toole home, which sits at the end of a dirt path called Gold Mine Road, the walls are decorated with daughter Sarah O’Toole’s paintings and the sun brings a warm glow into the house. The O’Tooles had the house built in 1998.

Yesterday afternoon, relatives and friends came in and out of the house wishing their condolences. They busied themselves with stacks and boxes of photos, trying to find good ones of Katherine with the whole family, and reminiscing about a woman who put her heart into everything. “It was usually her taking the pictures,” Brian said. He said Katherine’s death had not fully sunk in for the family.

They found a large album where Katherine had neatly kept the children’s homework, their photographs, their artwork. One page had plastic bags with the silky blond and brown, ribboned hair of the O’Toole girls.

Megan Teves said her mother loved the elderly people she worked with. When she worked at the Nancy Ann Nursing Home in Foster on Thanksgiving, she would bring five or six patients home for dinner.

At Cedar Crest Subacute & Rehabilitation Centre where Katherine worked, she was a beloved coworker and caregiver.

Katherine was “very well loved” by her coworkers and the 47 residents in the dementia ward who appreciated her special care and sense of humor, said Cheryl Gillard, a license practical nurse. “The patients always called out to her.” Gillard worked with Katherine on weekend nights. On Sunday night, a happy Katherine recounted her trip to Florida last month to visit one of her three daughters who recently became engaged. O’Toole and her husband also have three younger foster sons.

“Her kids were her whole world,” said Gillard, and she loved to pass the night talking about them and joking about the challenges her boys, like all middle-school-aged kids, face.

Administrators at the nursing home, aided by social workers they had called in, broke the news to the other 11 unit workers when they arrived to start their 3 to 11 p.m. shifts Wednesday afternoon.

“Everyone pretty much broke down,” said Gillard. “Some were beyond devastated. They had just left her less than a full day earlier. At least one coworker had to be driven home.

“You have to have a special way to work with Alzheimer patients and Kathy had it,” said Gillard. “They will be asking for her for a long time.”

— With reports from Gina Macris