Woman Is 13th to Die in Tijuana Religious Rite : Tragedy: Officials maintain that the mother of eight and 12 others died from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, but relatives of the victims remain skeptical.

A 45-year-old Tijuana mother has become the 13th person to die of asphyxiation after inhaling carbon monoxide gas during a religious ceremony last week at an unventilated home in an outlying Tijuana neighborhood, authorities said Thursday.

The victim, Consuelo Ponce Ramirez, a mother of eight, died in her hospital bed at 4 a.m. Thursday, said Dr. Ariel Perez Munoz, director of the Social Security Clinic 20, where she and other survivors were being treated. She had been in a coma for a week.

Her daughter and namesake, Consuelo Moreno Ponce, 14, was among 12 victims found dead in the home Dec. 13 after a prayer session held by a self-styled spiritualist who apparently practiced a cleansing ritual loosely based on Roman Catholic traditions. The mother and four others, including the group’s spiritual leader, were found alive and were hospitalized.

Hospital authorities now say that a man believed to have been a sixth survivor was actually suffering from an unrelated illness.

The self-styled spiritualist, Federico Padres Mexia, a retired cement mason who lived for years in Southern California but settled in Tijuana last summer, remains in a deep coma and is not expected to recover, the hospital official said. Mexia held religious sessions during which participants, mostly poor migrants seeking a better life, attempted to communicate with Catholic deities.

Of the three other initial survivors, one man, 32, remains in a coma at a private hospital while two others--a 22-year-old Tijuana resident and his niece, aged 4 months--have recovered and were released from the Social Security clinic this week.

Authorities have said that autopsy results and the findings of toxicological tests all indicate that the victims probably suffered from inhaling carbon monoxide gas, an odorless, poisonous byproduct of the incomplete burning of fossil fuels. Investigators have traced the gas to a hand-rigged butane lantern that provided light at the ceremonial site, where doors and windows were shut tight during the chilly evening service.

However, coroner’s officials in Tijuana are still awaiting a final analysis of the samples, which were submitted to the office of the medical examiner in San Diego County.

Family members and some doctors have publicly voiced fears that a more insidious force might have been at work--that victims may have been poisoned--deliberately or inadvertently--perhaps by eating tainted food, drinking a spiked fruit punch that was shared during the ceremony, or through some pernicious rite. Rumors of such foul play have been widely discussed in the Mexican press.

But Baja California state officials on Thursday reiterated their belief that the deaths--which immediately provoked images of the mass suicide of religious cultists in Guyana more than a decade ago--were the result of a tragic misfortune linked to the faulty gas lantern.

“We have definitely established that this was an accident,” said Victor Vasquez, the deputy Baja California district attorney who is handling the investigation. “For me, there is no question that carbon monoxide poisoning provoked the deaths.”

Authorities are expected to determine next week whether to file formal charges in connection with the deaths. Three people were initially apprehended for failure to notify police immediately after discovering the prostrate worshipers at the dwelling.

One of those detained, Ana Faviola Miranda Juarez, whose mother perished in the home, told reporters and police that she believed the celebrants were in the grasp of an intense religious trance when she discovered the mostly unconscious worshipers early Dec. 13. Instead of notifying authorities, police say, she and a friend sought out a “medium” who might be able to free the victims from their collective stupor.

Most of the victims were from several families in the poor Tijuana neighborhood of Colonia Mariano Matamoros, where Mexia practiced his peculiar variety of visionary religion, raising worshipers’ hopes for material and spiritual gains. Three families, all of them related by marriage, accounted for nine of the 17 known casualties, including six of the dead and three of the injured.

“Our families have been devastated,” said Jesus Moreno, 23, whose mother died this week and whose younger sister was among those found dead.

A wake is scheduled for his mother this Saturday and Sunday at a government-run funeral home in Tijuana. She is scheduled to be buried at a city cemetery Sunday.