Crash Victims’ Loved Ones Converge at Local Hospital

SANTA ANA —  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 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 daughter had survived with only slight injuries. But the others? No one was sure.

“It’s terrible for me,” Castro said, clutching another daughter to her hip as she waited for her husband and 4-year-old to be discharged from the hospital. “My niece, my sister-in-law, and more people . . . it’s terrible.”

Within a few minutes, Edgar Lopez walked in, wondering what had happened to his loved ones. “My mother, my brother,” Lopez wailed, falling to the floor of the waiting room. But news was scarce--only three victims of the crash had been taken to Coastal Communities, and Lopez’s relatives were not among them. So he set off for the Santa Ana Police Station in search of more information.

Then 4-year-old Catarina Sandoval, Castro’s daughter, came out of the emergency room. Dressed in a pink lace party dress with plastic beaded bracelets on her arm, the girl had bruises on her face and a brightly colored Band-Aid on her leg.

“A car drove into the middle of our van,” the girl said quietly. She told her mother that she could not remember anything else about the accident.

Another relative, Dolores Martinez, 46, who survived the crash with only a cut lip, joined Castro in the waiting room. Martinez toted her grandson, 1-year-old Alexander Noel Martinez--Castro’s nephew--who also escaped from the van with only minor cuts and bruises.

“The car had a red light and went through,” Martinez said, shaking with tears for other relatives whose conditions were unknown.

Soon Castro’s husband, Saul Sandoval, limped through the door, his jeans cut open by paramedics. Clutching a Bible, Sandoval said he was thankful that his aching hip and lower back were his only injuries.

“I’m tired now. I can’t remember. I want to forget,” Sandoval said when asked about the accident.

“What happened happened, I don’t want to talk about it right now,” he said.