Crash Shatters Paramount Family’s Dreams : Accident: Parents, youngest son and a friend are killed as van flips on a Mexican highway. Three other sons and a daughter survive.

The dream of Elvira Guerrero was to win a pink Cadillac--the reward of a successful Mary Kay Cosmetics director--to park in the driveway of her crowded home in Paramount.

“I’m not sure why she was so determined to have that car,” said a sister-in-law, Natalia Juarez of Lynwood. “She lived in such a little house--one bedroom and a (converted) garage for five children. She wasn’t ambitious, but maybe she thought the car would shine in front of that house.”

Tragedy shattered that dream and many others on Tuesday, when Guerrero, 35, was killed along with her husband Jose, 40, and her youngest son, Jesus, 2, in an old family van near Guaymas, Mexico.

Also killed was a friend, Guadalupe Delgado, who fell asleep at the wheel when the van ran off a road 12 miles north of the city of Guaymas, Sonora, Mexican police said.

In critical condition at a Guaymas Hospital Friday was the Guerreros’ daughter, Isabel, 17, a senior at Paramount High School who hoped to start college in Los Angeles next fall.

Her three brothers--Eduardo, 17, Raul, 14, and Jose Jr., 13--were in good condition with less serious injuries. Linandro Pantoja, Jose Guerrero’s uncle, was also injured.

News of the deaths hit relatives hard in Los Angeles County, the home of six of Jose Guerrero’s seven brothers and sisters. Guerrero, a mechanic, was taking his family back to Michoacan to visit his remaining sister. Afterward, he planned to bring his aging mother to Los Angeles to live.

The Guerrero family had begun immigrating to Southern California from the small town of Santa Ana Amacatlan, Michoacan, in the mid-1970s, relatives said.

For years, Elvira Guerrero worked in a meat-packing plant to supplement her husband’s income. She became a Mary Kay consultant about two years ago, relatives said. Juarez said her sister-in-law hoped to rise through the Mary Kay company to become a director who would be eligible for a pink Cadillac under an incentive formula.

“She wasn’t ambitious, but just friendly and hard-working,” Juarez said. “Jose was very happy, very sharing. He was like a father to the rest of us. He was the one we always went to for advice, for funds. Now, it is up to us, with much pain, to help their children.”

Juarez said she and other relatives are struggling to raise more than $10,000 to cover funeral costs and hospital bills. Juarez said she had already raised about $1,200 from family members.

Martin Torres, press attache for the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles, said Mexican officials had intervened to allow the three sons to return home without payment of the bills.

The Guerreros’ 14-year-old son Raul, also a student at Paramount High School, tried to avert the collision, he said in a telephone interview from a Guaymas hospital Friday. The accident occurred on a stretch of modern four-lane highway in the state of Sonora that is the site of frequent accidents because people tend to speed in the area, Mexican police said.

But this accident, said Raul wasn’t caused by speeding.

“Everybody in the car was asleep because we had been driving all night,” said Raul. “I was sitting in the front seat and looked over and saw that (Delgado) was falling asleep. I screamed at him, ‘Wake up!’ I tried to grab the steering wheel, but it was too late. He woke up astonished, and hit the accelerator.”

When the car swerved off the road, turning over in the process, his parents and little brother, none of whom were wearing seat belts, were ejected.

Another relative said the three brothers, all with broken bones, gathered around their sister’s hospital bed this week after her screams of pain prompted the doctors to sedate her heavily. Today, the relative said, the three sons will be driven back to Los Angeles.

As Raul spoke, it became clear that he had not yet been told his parents and youngest brother are dead, only that they were in isolation in a separate hospital for treatment.

Once back, said Juarez, Raul’s aunt, the brothers will be given more medical treatment if necessary and told of the deaths.

“We will be responsible for them until we see what happens with Isabel because she is the eldest now,” Juarez said. “Little by little, the boys will learn the truth. We just want to make sure they’re all right first.”

Raul, who Juarez said will see no news reports of his parents’ deaths, continued to express faith on Friday that his parents and little brother will survive.

“I believe they will live,” he said by telephone. “I saw them after the accident happened. They couldn’t talk, but they were breathing. My mom is unconscious; that’s why they keep her isolated from us now. But she is determined.”