Crash Dead Buried; Fund Begun for Boy

As five members of a family killed in an El Toro accident last week were buried Friday, friends and relatives were appealing for aid to help pay the survivors’ mounting debts.

Joe Mendoza, 16, was orphaned last weekend when, on the way back from a memorial Mass for a relative in El Toro, the car in which he was riding was struck head-on near Irvine Lake. His father, pregnant mother, maternal grandparents and 10-year-old sister all died, as did the driver of the other car, Nahum Rincon, 40, of Ripon in Central California.

To aid Joe, friends and family members set up the Joe Mendoza Fund (P.O. Box 3609, Los Angeles, Calif. 90051) and are requesting donations in lieu of flowers.

Marianne Nassour of Sherman Oaks, a close friend of the family who is helping organize the fund, said that Joe’s father, Joe Cruz Norman Mendoza, had named his wife as his beneficiary, and she in turn had named her mother; both women were killed in the crash.

“The whole thing is in probate now,” Nassour said.

As those matters are worked out, Nassour said, Joe Mendoza and other family members are responsible for bills in connection with the crash that she estimated as totaling more than $75,000. These include burial costs, legal fees and hospital bills for the several victims who did not die immediately in the accident, she said.

Finances, however, were the least of the concerns of the several hundred family members and friends who gathered Friday to bid goodby to the deceased. Those killed were Maria Sanchez, 67; her husband, Vicente Sanchez, 69; their daughter, Mary Mendoza, 33; Mary’s husband, Joe Cruz Norman Mendoza; and the Mendozas’ daughter, Charlene, 10.

Several family members, Joe and his surviving grandmother among them, were overcome with grief and had to be helped from the burial site.

“It was all very emotional,” Nassour said. “It was just extremely difficult to see, knowing the family and what good people they were and seeing this kind of tragedy come to them. It was just heartbreaking to witness this.”

The funeral services were at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Rowland Heights, and the burial was at Forest Lawn, West Covina.

Meanwhile, California Highway Patrol investigators Friday were awaiting laboratory results to determine whether Rincon had been driving under the influence of alcohol when he apparently crossed the center divider on Santiago Canyon Road near Irvine Lake as he was making a left turn out of a driveway. Rincon struck the Mendoza truck head-on. That vehicle was part of a caravan returning from the memorial Mass for Norm Mendoza’s brother, who had died of cancer, at St. Michael’s Abbey in El Toro.

“We thought they might come back today,” CHP Officer Angel Johnson said of the blood-alcohol results Friday, “but we haven’t had any luck.”

Johnson added, though, that investigators doubt that alcohol caused the tragedy. Rather, she said, “there is the possibility that this guy was fatigued; apparently he had come from his home in Modesto and might not have gotten much sleep.”

She added that Rincon had apparently been helping someone move at the time of the crash.