7 Die, 8 Hurt in Santa Ana as 3 Vehicles Collide

SANTA ANA —  In one of the most deadly traffic accidents in Orange County history, seven people were killed and eight others injured Sunday evening when three vehicles collided near downtown, including a van carrying 15 passengers to evening church services.

The dead were not immediately identified after the 6 p.m. crash, but authorities said that they included five adults and two children, one of them an infant. One of the victims was nine months pregnant.

“I’ve been in the department for 22 years and I can’t recall an accident scene like this,” said Lt. Bob Helton of the Santa Ana Police Department.

Firefighters said the victims were scattered throughout the intersection of Civic Center Drive and Flower Street, along with Bibles and other religious articles strewn from the van.

All of the dead were believed to have been passengers in the van, which authorities said contained bench seats that were not bolted to the floor and did not have safety belts.

“Paramedics said it looked like a morgue out there,” Anne Ford, a clinical coordinator at UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, said of the accident scene. “Instead of waiting for ambulances, people were piling the injured into their individual cars to take to the hospital.”

Ford said that shortly after the crash, UCI received two critically injured boys, ages 2 and 10, who were suffering from head and body injuries.

“We have no idea who these children are,” Ford said. “We don’t know if their parents are dead or alive. Their injuries are really, really, really critical.”

By late Sunday, the injured were being treated in hospitals from Orange to Mission Viejo.

Santa Ana police said the van was eastbound on Civic Center Drive; the two other vehicles, a Chevrolet pickup truck and a BMW, were southbound on Flower. Lt. Bob Helton said that one or both of the southbound vehicles apparently ran a red light at the intersection, colliding with the van.

Helton said the driver of the pickup apparently fled.

Firefighters who were among the first to arrive described the accident scene near Eddie West Field-Santa Ana Stadium as “bedlam.”

Within minutes, Santa Ana Fire Inspector Larry Garcia said, medical evacuation helicopters were whirling to landings in the intersection and at the stadium to provide aid and hospital evacuations for the most critically injured. So bloody was the accident scene that Garcia said some of his most seasoned firefighters were repulsed.

After the collision, Phillip Villegas, 20, said he was one of the first to arrive as he was returning to his home about two miles away.

“I just saw about three or four cars,” Villegas said. “It didn’t look like a big accident. But I saw a whole lot of people just lying in the street bleeding,” he said. “People were stopping by to help them and using whatever they could find to stop the bleeding. Some were using clothes. Others were just using rags, holding them up to the wounds.”

When Adelia Castro arrived at the hospital at 8 p.m. Sunday, she did not know how much family she had left.

Castro’s husband, 4-year-old daughter, sister-in-law, niece and nephews had left Garden Grove less than three hours earlier in a van bound for church--as they did every Sunday afternoon. All she knew was that there had been a terrible accident.

“No, no,” she cried as she met another woman in the emergency waiting room of Coastal Communities Hospital. “All my family was there. I don’t know.”

For Castro, the news was mixed. Her husband and 4-year-old had survived, but the others? No one was sure.

Staff writers Kevin Johnson, Gebe Martinez, Jodi Wilgoren, Eric Young and Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this story.