Mother’s Fears End in Tragedy : Suicide: A woman who was described as profoundly depressed drives her van into L.A. Harbor. Her four children die with her.

The waterfront at Berth 68 of the Los Angeles Harbor is a little-known spot where people go to think, to watch the cruise ships pass and to unwind after a long day at work. On Tuesday night, it was the place where Ophilia Yip took herself and her four young children to die.

Sometime before 7 p.m., she loaded her three sons and 3-year-old daughter into the family’s minivan and drove to the secluded San Pedro point. She stopped the van at the red curb that faces the water and let the engine idle for a minute or so. Then she backed up 300 feet, turned on her high beams and put the accelerator to the floor.

“There was a little screech of the tires, like burning rubber, and then whoooooooooom, “ said Tom Kenourgios, a film location coordinator who was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper when he saw the van rocket into the harbor at something like 60 m.p.h.

Although Yip, a 34-year-old Chinese immigrant, was seen by some as a model parent, those who knew her best said she was a woman profoundly depressed and worried that life in Los Angeles would corrupt her children.

“She seemed so normal,” a stunned Alvin Yip said of his wife of 15 years, who just that day fixed his lunch and did the laundry before driving into the dark waters of the harbor’s main channel.

When city Fire Department divers found the van 25 minutes later, Ophilia Yip was dead. Her 3-year-old daughter Nichole died two hours later at a nearby hospital.

By then, divers who were working in blinding mud and pitch-black darkness marked the spot with a yellow buoy and abandoned the search, thinking they had found all of the victims.

But Wednesday morning, after Yip’s husband reported that his three sons were also missing, a second team of divers ventured back into the 58-degree water. Aaron, 6, and Derrick, 4, were still strapped behind seat belts in the back seat. Thirteen-year-old Jason was unharnessed in the back. Officials said a small handgun was floating in a bag near the water’s surface.

“It makes us feel just terrible,” L.A. City Fire Battalion Chief Claude Creasey said as divers wrestled with the notion that the boys might have been alive when the rescue effort was aborted Tuesday night.

The water was as black as ink and visibility was “absolute zero,” the divers reported.

“They thought they had done a thorough search,” Creasey explained. “They gave 100% effort. If we had known there were likely to be more people down there, we’d have stayed here all night.”

Los Angeles police detectives were classifying the deaths as murder-suicide. Detectives had yet to determine whether the handgun belonged to Yip or was already in the water before the crash. No one had been shot, and the children did not appear to have been abused, officials said. Yip, they said, left no note.

Indeed, her day seemed almost routine on Tuesday, her husband said. She got the children off to school and went to the bank before he left for his 1 p.m. shift as a computer technician.

“I would think if she planned this she’d at least have left me a note,” Alvin Yip said, his voice a stunned monotone as he sat at the dining room table in the family’s two-story, Tudor-style home in Sepulveda. “I’ve searched the house, looking for tapes, cassettes, everything.”

The burglar alarm had been turned on when Alvin Yip arrived home at about 9:30 p.m. He assumed that his wife had taken the children shopping, as she often did. At 10:30 p.m., the police knocked on the door.

Yip said his wife had been depressed in recent months, apparently preoccupied by the pressures of raising a family in Los Angeles, their home for some years. She missed Stockton, the Central Valley town where the couple met and where her parents still live, he said.

“She worried a lot about her kids--our kids--and the way they were being brought up, and how they’d turn out. She didn’t really want to raise them in Los Angeles and wanted to move back to Stockton. But I explained to her I cannot find a job there and we had to wait two, three years until the economy gets better.”

Yip, a telecommunications technician in Los Angeles, said he took his wife to see a counselor a few months ago and stayed with her during the first session. But after a second session alone, she stopped going, telling him later that “because of her Chinese upbringing and heritage, she had a problem only someone with our culture could understand.”

Born in Hong Kong, Ophilia Yip had moved with her parents to Stockton when she was 15, but never completely assimilated into American life, her husband said. She felt particularly isolated in Los Angeles and feared that the urban setting was not healthy for her children.

“She feared that with the environment, that they would grow up to be bad,” Alvin Yip said.

To the contrary, principals of the children’s schools said they were fine students with no apparent sign of stress at home. One school administrator characterized the Yips as a model family.

“Just perfect,” said Fay Harris, director of the private Panorama City preschool where 4-year-old Derrick was enrolled and where his older brothers had also attended. “They were sweet and loving.”

Harris, who began sobbing when she heard the news, said she used to call Aaron “my little hugaboo” because he would frequently go into her office at the Pinecrest School and give her a hug. All three of the boys were quick learners and showed academic promise, she said.

“I’m shocked beyond belief,” she said.

Alvin Yip’s sister, Betsy Ho of Encino, said her sister-in-law had been devoted to her children--particularly 3-year-old Nichole, the daughter she had tried for years to have.

“She desperately wanted a little girl, and she finally had one,” Ho said. “She just adored her little girl.”

Why Ophilia Yip chose San Pedro to end her life remains a mystery to her husband. The two of them, he said, had never been there together.

Tom Kenourgios, the eyewitness who returned to the waterfront Wednesday morning still stunned by what he had seen the night before, said the spot is known mostly by locals who go there to eat their lunch and enjoy the quiet.

Kenourgios watched as three small bodies were pulled from the water and a crane hoisted the shiny van from the ocean bottom, the hatchback yawning open.

Ophilia Yip had taken it over the side at such a high speed that rescuers said it skidded more than 40 feet when it hit the ocean floor. A diver had been following the tracks when he bumped into the van in the darkness.

“I saw her come to the curb and I saw her back up. Her high beams reflected in my rear-view mirror. And then she burned rubber,” Kenourgios said. “There was no hesitation. No stopping. She just cleared everything and was in the water. In 15 seconds, she was gone. I just couldn’t believe it.”

This article was reported by Times staff writers Faye Fiore, Leslie Berger and Marc Lacey. It was written by Fiore.