A Nissan Altima barreling at well over 100 miles per hour the wrong way down Interstate 25 early Tuesday slammed into an ambulance, killing the car's driver and leaving her passenger hospitalized and the 19-year-old ambulance driver in critical condition.

In the moments before the deadly crash just north of the Cerrillos Road exit, police frantically responded to reports of a driver rapidly headed toward Santa Fe on the wrong side of the divided highway from as far east as the Glorieta and Pecos exit, about 20 miles away from the eventual crash scene.

Within seven minutes of the first call to police, city and state police were preparing to lay down traffic spikes on the interstate near the Cerrillos Road interchange to flatten the car's tires and slow it down. However, the horrific collision happened less than a mile before Cerrillos Road.

"I have no idea how anybody could have survived, based on the wreckage I saw," Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia said. "It was really just unbelievable."

Santa Fe Police Chief Aric Wheeler wouldn't release the name of the deceased driver or her 38-year-old female passenger. He said next of kin had not yet been notified Tuesday evening.

The Altima in which they were traveling had Texas license plates. Police say both women in the car had identifications from Texas but were believed to have been living in Albuquerque.

The driver died at the scene. The 38-year-old passenger was still hospitalized at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center late Tuesday.

Police suspect alcohol was a factor. A blood sample was taken from the car's passenger at the hospital, and investigators will await autopsy results of the driver to determine any intoxication, Wheeler said.

"The obvious indicators are there — traveling the wrong way on the interstate, driving at high rates of speed, the crash occurring around 2 a.m.," Wheeler said of the possibility that alcohol was involved. "But while we may suspect it, we are not concluding that this was in fact alcohol-related at this point."

The Altima collided with a Rocky Mountain EMS ambulance, one designated for nonemergency medical transports. It was driven by 19-year-old Vanessa Carrillo, an emergency medical technician with the company.

Carrillo was airlifted to University Hospital in Albuquerque, where she was in critical but stable condition late Tuesday, according to a family friend. Carrillo underwent multiple surgeries Tuesday evening for broken bones in both legs, fractures in her face and a shattered elbow.

"She was conscious after the crash, but the pain was so much they had to put her in a medical coma," said Jennifer Guhl, a co-worker who was with Carrillo moments before the crash. The two had transported a patient from St. Vincent to Albuquerque and were headed home.

Carrillo, a 2009 Santa Fe High graduate and current Santa Fe Community College student who wants to one day become a doctor, lives in La Cienega with her father. She is one of four daughters. She was taking the ambulance back to work so she could pick up her car and go home.

If the speed of the Altima was in fact "in excess of 100 miles per hour" around the time of the crash, as Wheeler has stated, the closing speed between when Carrillo would have seen the car and the time of the collision would not have given the 19-year-old a reasonable chance to avoid the crash.

The crash scene, which stretched "several hundred feet," according to Wheeler, left I-25's northbound lanes closed from about 2:30 a.m. to about 2:30 p.m.

Joe Mascareñas, 68, of Ribera was on his way home from custodial work at The New Mexican when he used a cell phone to call 911 dispatchers at 2:17 a.m. to report that a car on the northbound lanes of I-25 nearly collided head-on with his 2000 Dodge van near the Glorieta and Pecos exit. His initial call came only moments after that incident.

After he got home later in the morning, Mascareñas called police again to report that the oncoming car had actually clipped the side of his van. He found bluish streaks of paint on his side-view mirror and the door to his gas cap, which he discovered had flipped open with the gas cap hanging out.

"All I saw was headlights," he said in recalling the incident. He also heard a loud sound when his collapsible side mirror apparently hit his driver's side window and then snapped back into position. "That was close."

According to dispatch records, his 2:17 a.m. call was the first of four that came in over the next four minutes, all reporting a car speeding the wrong way down the northbound interstate lanes.

By 2:22 a.m., according Garcia, two deputies — one parked on the median and the other on the east shoulder of northbound I-25 between the Old Pecos Trail and St. Francis Drive exits, each with emergency lights flashing — saw the woman speed by them. Both began to pursue her, also traveling south on the northbound lanes.

While the deputies began pursuit, a city police officer conducting a traffic stop on southbound I-25 saw the Altima drive past and echoed other police and witness reports that the car was likely traveling faster than 100 miles an hour.

"We aren't saying a specific speed because we don't know for sure, but I know there were officers going more than 100 trying to catch up to her and they were not closing ground," Wheeler said.

The crash was called in by a pursuing police officer at 2:24 a.m., only about seven minutes after the initial call came in.

Wheeler said the name of the driver and passenger of the Altima likely will be released early today after police are confident all next of kin have been notified.

The crash was reminiscent of a November 2006 crash near Eldorado that killed five members of a Las Vegas, N.M., family. Police say that in that crash, Dana Papst, 44, of Tesuque had a blood-alcohol content four times the legal limit (0.32) when the Dodge pickup he was driving collided head-on with a minivan around 8:05 p.m. Papst also died as a result of that crash.

Tuesday's crash was not the first time a Rocky Mountain EMS ambulance was hit by a wrong-way driver on northbound I-25.

Founder and former CEO Greg Walsh, who now lives in Washington, told The New Mexican via e-mail Tuesday that he was a paramedic in a company ambulance in 1996 when a driver collided with his transport vehicle south of La Bajada. Walsh and a co-worker also had been northbound on I-25 at the time.

In that case, a driver was going through diabetic shock and was being pursued by law-enforcement officers.

Nobody died in that collision. In fact, Walsh and other Rocky Mountain EMS paramedics were able to save the driver.

"I don't no know the details of this incident, so by no means am I pointing fingers," Walsh said, "but the most effective response is stopping all traffic in both directions. The most effective prevention is imbedded reflectors that show red to drivers proceeding the wrong direction."

Contact Geoff Grammer at 986-3076 or ggrammer@sfnewmexican.com. Read his blog at SantaFeCrime.com.