3 Die as Car in Crash Plunges Off Freeway : Traffic: Vehicle bursts into flame. Five would-be rescuers are injured.

Three people were killed and six others--including three police officers and two motorists who tried to rescue the victims--were injured when a two-vehicle crash on the Hollywood Freeway flung one car through a guardrail and 25 feet down onto a parking area Wednesday morning.

The accident, which forced closure of three northbound lanes of the freeway near Vermont Avenue, tied up morning rush-hour traffic throughout downtown.

The three who died were all occupants of a Toyota sedan that smashed through the guardrail and slammed onto the pavement of a storage facility under the freeway. Investigators said one of the victims apparently started to crawl free from the wreckage before the car, which teetered for a moment, rolled over on him and burst into flame.

None of the dead were immediately identified.

The three Los Angeles police officers and two motorists who helped them in their frustrated attempts to save the occupants of the burning sedan were all treated for smoke inhalation and released.

A woman in a pickup truck that collided with the sedan was treated for her injuries at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital and released. She was not identified.

California Highway Patrol Sgt. Mike Brey said the crash apparently was caused by the driver of a third vehicle that left the scene after the accident.

“That vehicle made a sharp left to get on the freeway upon leaving the Vermont on-ramp,” Brey said. “It forced the woman’s (truck) to collide with the Toyota. A witness chased the unsafe-lane-change driver and was able to obtain a license number. We are attempting to find the registered owner of that car.”

Police said Sgt. Skip McOmber of the Police Department’s Rampart Division had been headed north on the freeway about 6:20 a.m. when he happened onto the accident, which had just occurred. McOmber radioed for help.

Motorists Brett Heisinger, 23, of Fullerton, and Aaron Jackson, 24, of South Pasadena, driving to work in separate vehicles, drove up about the same time.

“I saw the car go over the side and I stopped my truck,” Heisinger said. “The policeman (McOmber) was right behind me.

“I told him the car had just gone over the side,” Heisinger said. “I could see it was just starting to burn. I thought maybe we could save whoever was inside, so I got a fire extinguisher from my truck and we ran 50 yards down the freeway to an embankment, went down that, climbed over a fence and started shooting that stuff on the car.

“But the fire wouldn’t go out,” Heisinger continued. “So the police officer and I took a steel bar from the broken guardrail, wedged the bar under the burning car and lifted it. The other guy (Jackson) pulled a guy out from under the car as we lifted it.”

Heisinger said that at the time, “I never even thought about the fire, or that the car might explode. But after we got that guy out, the fire started going pretty good, and we had to back away.”

Officer Cornia Smith said she and her partner, Officer Josh Adler, were in their patrol car about two blocks away when they heard McOmber’s radio call.

“We got on an on-ramp and got up there as fast as we could, but the freeway traffic was all stopped,” Smith said. “We couldn’t drive through it, so we got out and ran through the traffic, jumped over the guardrail and ran down the embankment and across the street (Heliotrope Drive) to where the car had landed. It was still burning.”

Smith said she and Adler tried to reach the car to rescue the two victims still trapped inside, “but there was so much smoke and flame we couldn’t even see in it.

“We knew it was going to blow up, and then it did.”

Realizing there was nothing more that could be done for those in the car, Smith said, she and her partner clambered back up onto the freeway, to see what could be done for the driver of the overturned pickup.

“Somehow, the woman had gotten out of it by herself,” Smith said. “She was dazed, confused. But she was out of the truck.”

Traffic on downtown freeways and local surface streets was jammed for more than three hours as a result of the crash.