Parents Anxiously Awaited Life-or-Death Calls : Scouts: Tracking down information about bus accident proved a difficult chore.

For some, the phone calls started coming in at nightfall. For others, the first scattered bits of information came from the evening news.

The reports were sketchy at best: There had been a terrible bus accident, far away, in Southern California. Several of the 60 Girl Scouts aboard the bus were dead, dozens were injured. And their daughter was on that bus.

“We didn’t know whether Kristy was dead or not,” said Linda Crawley, a housewife in Mustang, Okla. “We were really scared.”

While many relatives across the nation got first word from hospital officials, Crawley and her husband, Mike, knew nothing of the accident until a friend telephoned and said she’d heard something on the news.

In the frantic minutes that followed, Linda Crawley called everywhere she could think of in a desperate search for news of their 15-year-old daughter.

“First I called a news station here in town, and they gave me the name of Desert Hospital in Palm Springs,” she said. “The people there gave us another number, for another hospital,” which turned out to be John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Indio. “We called there. They took our name and number. They said they’d call back.”

For three agonizing minutes, the Crawleys waited.

“Then a doctor called,” Linda Crawley said. “He said he had examined Kristy. He said she was fine. Kristy called us a few minutes later. She had a scratch and a bruise on her elbow.”

The Crawleys were among the lucky ones. Seven people died when the bus whirled down a rocky precipice; four were Girl Scouts. Eleven remained in critical or serious condition, five of them on life-support systems.

In San Antonio, Tex., the Schiebels learned that they, too, were lucky that day.

Bill Schiebel, and his wife, Patricia--the parents of Tracie Schiebel--had just as hard a time finding out what had happened to their daughter as the Crawleys had, according to Schiebel’s sister, Joann Tschirhart.

When Tschirhart’s daughter called from Houston about the accident, “I called Tracie’s mom here and told her to call the Girl Scout office,” Tschirhart said. “No one had contacted them, and she was pretty upset.” A friend in San Diego finally found out that Tracie was at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

“Bill called the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell him anything,” Tschirhart said. “All they’d say was that they had five girls there. Finally, about 30 minutes later, they called back and said she had concussions and lacerations, but she was fine.

“And they said she had a message: ‘Tell Mom and Dad that I love them.’ ”

An hour later, as they were about to fly to their daughter’s side, the Schiebels were able to talk to Tracie and hear it firsthand from her.

John and Janet Snowden of Wheatfield, Ind., were not so fortunate.

Their daughter, Jennifer, who suffered major chest injuries in the crash could not speak because doctors had put a respirator tube down her throat.

But Jennifer, a spunky 17-year-old, communicated with them anyway, writing notes as they stood beside her bed in the intensive care unit at Desert Hospital, where her condition was listed as stable.

His voice shaking and his eyes filled with tears, John Snowden talked later with reporters in the hospital lobby.

“She’s all confused right now,” Snowden said. “She asking a lot of questions and we are trying to answer her.”

Snowden, a lineman for an Indiana utility company, said the company sent a messenger out to notify him of the accident. He and his wife took the first flight to Southern California.

All the Scouts had been looking forward to the trip for a long time, their families said Thursday.

Heather Dubey, 15, suffered a severe head wound and remained hospitalized Thursday at Eisenhower. Just hours before the accident, she had called her sister, Amy, 18, to say that she had been to Knott’s Berry Farm “and was having a great time.”

The family got word of the crash when the hospital telephoned their home in Lake City, Mich., to say that Heather had survived the accident but was in critical condition.

“Mom was pretty much in shock,” Amy said Thursday. “She flew out there first thing this morning.”

Ted Veremeychick, a schoolteacher from Fairport, N.Y., said he and his wife, Mary Lou, knew nothing about it until their 15-year-old daughter, Chrissy, who was on the “California Dreamin’ ” trip, called to say “that there had been a terrible accident.”

Veremeychick, like others, said he was frustrated by the early lack of information, but realized that there were more urgent priorities.

Crawley had no criticisms about the delays.

Eng reported from Palm Springs and Malnic from Los Angeles.