3 Die in Orange After Car Skids off Wet Freeway

Three friends whose apparent desire for fun overcame warnings that it was too dangerous to drive were killed Sunday when their high-powered Ford Mustang convertible veered out of control on the rain-slicked Garden Grove Freeway and overturned.

Scott A. Dowling, 18, of Cypress; Jeffrey D. Trollinger, 19, of Garden Grove, and Dana P. Conner, 22, of Riverside died about 3:20 a.m., shortly after they snatched the car keys from a friend at a party who feared for their safety.

“I tried to tell them not to go,” said Dan Pryor, Trollinger’s best friend. “It was raining, it was late and the car was powerful. But Scott grabbed the keys and took off. Now, no one’s going to drive it. They shouldn’t make cars that powerful.”

Dowling, a member of the football, wrestling and track teams at Pacifica High School in Garden Grove, was a friend of Trollinger, who graduated from Pacifica in 1988. Conner had just moved from Garden Grove to a new home in Riverside and knew Trollinger from work at a McDonald’s restaurant.

All three got together after midnight at a Motel 6 in Stanton, where Pacifica High School students were having a party in one of the rooms after a formal dance at Plaza de Cafes in Newport Beach.

Dowling, a senior, attended the dance before going to the party. Earlier Saturday, he participated in a high school wrestling tournament in San Clemente but had to withdraw because of a sore shoulder.

Conner, who rented the Mustang GT with its powerful V-8 engine, drove it to the Motel 6 at Katella and Western avenues after having let some of his friends get behind the wheel during the day.

Sometime before 3 a.m., Dowling, Trollinger and Conner wanted to take the car out for one last ride, Pryor said, but he and other party-goers refused to give up the keys and tried repeatedly to talk them out of it.

Pryor said he had lost control of the 1989 convertible earlier in the evening when he hit a puddle at 50 m.p.h. The car turned sideways, he said, and drifted to a halt without hitting anything.

“I put the keys in my pocket and said, ‘No one is driving,’ ” Pryor recalled. “But they said they were just going to drive around the block. You just don’t expect things like this to happen.”

A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol said the Mustang was going east on the Garden Grove Freeway at high speed when it ran off the road, slid down an embankment and overturned on a shoulder of the Grand Avenue on-ramp.

Although the CHP does not know the exact cause of the crash, officers noted that it was raining at the time. A spokesman for the Orange County coroner’s office said Sunday that tests had not been completed to determine whether the young men had been drinking.

‘A Good Boy’

Their friends who attended the party said Sunday that Dowling, Trollinger and Conner were not intoxicated when they got into the car. They specifically pointed out that Dowling, the driver, wasn’t drinking.

“I know a lot of mothers and parents say this, but my Scott was a good boy and he didn’t drink or do drugs,” said Casey Dowling, the young man’s mother. “His high in life was football, basketball and sports. All they wanted to do was go out on one last ride and he lost control of the car. It hydroplaned and they were killed.”

Dowling said a CHP officer came to her door Sunday morning and told her that a blood test revealed no drugs or alcohol in her son’s system. She quoted the officer as saying that Scott “looked like a fine young man any mom would be proud off.”

Services for Scott Dowling have been tentatively scheduled for Thursday morning at Westminster Memorial Park. The family plans to have their son buried in a sweat shirt and cap from UCLA, where he wanted to play football.

“He was the best brother you could ever have,” said Tim Dowling, Scott’s identical twin, who wrestled for Pacifica in a lighter weight class than Scott.

Friends of both families, relatives and Pacifica High School students met on Sunday afternoon at the Garden Grove home of Margaret Stewart, Trollinger’s mother, to console each other. They sat in her kitchen and living room, below family pictures and a framed enlargement of Trollinger’s high school portrait.

“He was really a good person and a good friend, who was part of everybody’s family,” Stewart said. “He was always willing to help out. When someone was down, he was always there to support them.”

Trollinger’s friends recalled that he was outgoing and worked 65 hours a week at an Alpha Beta supermarket and a McDonald’s, where he was a manager. On top of that, he occasionally worked for the Long Beach Press Telegram.

“He was a walking telephone book,” said Carolyn Pryor, Dan Pryor’s mother, about Trollinger. “If he dialed a number he could always remember it, and he could easily recall lines from movies and commercials. He always tried to make people feel happy.”

Members of the Conner family could not be reached for comment.

Before going to Stewart’s house Sunday, Carolyn Pryor, known as “Mom” to the Pacifica wrestling team because of her devotion to its members, visited the Dowling family. She said Tim Dowling was devastated by the loss.

“He said, ‘Now I have to win for Scott,’ ” she said.

Staff writer Jim Newton contributed to this story.