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Japanese karasu (crows) are carrion eaters and can smell death from afar; greater than the distance from where we hear their raucous caw.
They are also one of the smartest bird species. They have the largest brain-to-body ratio of any other type of bird, a ratio even bigger than humans. When they see a white substance in a bowl in front of a gravestone, they know that's rice for their dinner. And they caw.
Smarter still, when they see a monk leading a group of people with a coffin into a graveyard, they know there'll soon be a great feast. And they caw twice.
And smartest of all, they can sense when a person is soon going to be the body in a coffin. And they caw three times.
Crows in Japan have the same bad image as in any other country, due to their sharp ugly beaks, black feathers, large bodies, and they don't 'sing' as sweetly as the sayonakidori (nightingale) or uguisu (bush warbler).
And yes, you'll see them feasting on roadkill more than other birds, mainly because they're big enough to bully away anything smaller.
Perhaps that's why in English we refer to a flock of them as a "murder of crows", in contrast to the pretentious "bouquet of pheasants", "parliament of owls", "ostentation of peacocks", etc.
As for the number of times they caw, crows are very social birds most often the reason for cawing is to signal to their companions. If they think their companions are close by, they might caw once, then pause for a few seconds listening for a reply. If another crow doesn't respond, they might try two caws, or three.
There's no evidence that the number of caws have any particular meaning in ornithology or parapsychology. They are just crows, and not at all their fault they were born as crows.