SAN CLEMENTE : Services Conducted for 3 Killed in Crash

The classrooms of San Clemente High School were deserted Friday as hundreds of grief-stricken students and faculty members attended memorial services for three classmates killed in a tragic joy ride last weekend.

Turning out in numbers usually reserved for the famous, they clung to each other and tried to make sense of a car accident that police are calling one of the worst in the city’s history.

Abel Aguilar Jr., 18, and brothers Marco Martinez, 17, and David Martinez, 16, were remembered in two separate memorial services.

Teen-ager Jason Diaz told almost 700 people at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church in San Clemente that his close friend Abel Aguilar was “always there for us whenever we needed him.”

Diaz said it was Aguilar who would help him through difficult times.

“Abel would always come up and try to make me laugh. . . . I will miss him very much,” he said.

Later in the day at Pacific View Memorial Park in Newport Beach, Grant Sad of Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in National City, where the Martinez family are members, told the standing-room-only throng that “there’s no pain greater than the loss of a loved one. Certainly that pain is something we’ll have to deal with today.”

The ceremony ended with the opening of the two red caskets at the front of the flower-lined chapel. Hundreds of family members, friends and fellow students took the opportunity for a last look at the two popular brothers.

Outside the chapel afterward, the mourners milled about, many on the way to a gathering at the Martinez family’s San Clemente home.

“Normally, this being a Friday before a three-day weekend, kids would be celebrating,” said Kathy Keith, 17. “But not this week.”

Police are still trying to sort out details of the Saturday accident. It occurred around noon after Thomas Sheehan, 18, and Andrew Felix, 17, were excused early from a detention class for talking, school officials say.

Police say that another student in detention, an unidentified 15-year-old boy who had taken his parents’ 1988 Jaguar to school, was talked into lending the keys to Felix and Sheehan so they could listen to the car radio.

The pair met Aguilar and the Martinez brothers on campus, and the group piled into the Jaguar and headed out to an isolated stretch of Avenida Pico in eastern San Clemente.

The car was going about 120 m.p.h. near the intersection of Avenida Pico and Avenida La Pata when it veered out of control, police say.