PITTSFORD — A minivan veered off a suburban road, rolled down a snowy embankment and landed upside down in a shallow creek, leaving a woman dead.

A municipal employee spotted the vehicle lying in about 3 feet of water when he turned into tiny King’s Bend Park in the Rochester suburb of Pittsford shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday. The accident happened sometime overnight and crash investigators suspect that fresh snowfall was a contributing factor.

The minivan left a two-lane blacktop near the bottom of a short hill, crashed over the end of a guardrail and ended up on its roof in the 8-foot-wide creek, sheriff’s Cpl. John Helfer said.

The creek, covered with a layer of ice, leads to a pond used by fishing enthusiasts in summertime.

“It looks like the guardrail flipped the vehicle over and it went down the hill,” Helfer said. “It did snow overnight but it’s difficult to speculate what the conditions were because we don’t know what time she went off the road. She was there apparently for an extended period of time.”

The victim’s identity was not immediately disclosed, and the cause remains under investigation.

The tragedy bore some similarities to a Nov. 18 crash in the rural town of Manchester, 20 miles east of here, when a car skidded on the season’s first snowfall, swerved off a downward sloping, two-lane highway and rolled down an embankment into a 12-foot-deep backyard pond.

Sean Dusinberre, 37, drowned after kicking out the driver’s side window and carrying his 3-year-old son, Dylan, to the surface on his back. His other son, 13-year-old Joshua, survived without injuries. The younger boy, who was placed on a ventilator, died nine days later on Thanksgiving morning.

The car was traveling at around 50 mph on a road with a 55 mph speed limit, police said. Its speed on a slushy, snow-covered road and inadequate rear tires were cited as factors contributing to the accident.