Boy Pulled to His Death Through Bus Floor

A 3-year-old boy was killed in a freak accident when steel cables from a minibus tire blowout burst through the floor of the bus, snatching him from his mother’s lap and throwing him onto Interstate 5 in Oceanside, the California Highway Patrol said Monday.

Ramon Prado Jr. of Santa Ana was killed Saturday when a rear tire of the minibus exploded and its snakelike steel treads slammed through the floor of the vehicle, dragging the sleeping boy from his mothers’ arms, CHP spokesman Jerry Bohrer said.

Ramon was struck and killed by the 11,000-pound minibus and one or more cars on northbound I-5 near Harbor Drive about 8:20 p.m., San Diego County coroner’s spokesman Cal Vine said.

His hysterical mother, Berta Galvan, was uninjured. She was taken to Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside and released Sunday night.

No one else was hurt in the Mother’s Day-eve accident, which stunned the 15 bus passengers and bewildered CHP officers.

“The odds of anything like this ever happening are astronomical,” Bohrer said. “I have been an officer for 26 years, and I have never seen anything like this before.”

The 8-year-old Ford minibus, owned by Huntington Park-based Transportes Fronteras, was shuttling passengers from San Diego to Los Angeles when the rear tire blew and the flailing metal cables ripped through the 1-inch-thick plywood and plastic-foam floor, said Jose Lopez, a spokesman for the shuttle company.

The Prados were returning from a vacation in the Mexican state of Michoacan to their home in Santa Ana in Orange County.

The family had planned to meet Sunday for a Mother’s Day dinner. But Monday, the small living room in Santa Ana, dotted with pictures of Ramon and three other siblings, was filled with tears as the family came together to plan a funeral instead.

The Prados had taken their children to Mexico “because we didn’t want them playing too much in front of the house,” said Ramon Prado Sr. as he and other relatives watched a videotape of Ramon Jr. frolicking on a Mexican beach a week ago. “We didn’t want them to get bored.”

“The child was very beautiful,” said Julia Galvan, 25, the boy’s aunt. “The loss is so sad because it was Mother’s Day, it was going to be his birthday (later this month), and it was going to be so happy.”

Two of the buses in Transportes Fronteras’ 17-bus fleet, inspected by CHP officials in February, were rated unsatisfactory on maintenance records, driver records and vehicle condition, CHP spokesman John Davis said.

Davis said two or three vehicles are randomly chosen in the yearly inspections to represent the entire fleet. The vehicle involved in the accident, which was not among those examined, was not taken off the road because the owners indicated that they had made some of the necessary repairs, including a smog check, CHP officials said.

The plywood and plastic-foam floor is not illegal, the CHP said. There are no federal standards governing construction of such a floor, Davis said.

“The tire incident is the kind of thing we see on a regular basis, but the penetration of the tire into that vehicle is very rare, and that is what alarms us,” Davis said. “We are going to make recommendations to manufacturers on reinforcing the body of the vehicles with steel in the area of the wheel wells. That sort of a structure is strong enough to withstand penetration.”

“We’re just a small family company. The driver hasn’t been able to sleep for three days,” said Joel Lopez, president of Transportes Fronteras. “Maybe the tire was defective. The floor didn’t have any problems that we knew about.”

Omphroy reported from San Diego and Young from Orange County. Times staff writer Sebastian Rotella in San Diego also contributed.