BUENA PARK : Return of Bodies in Prom Crash Delayed

A family whose daughters died in a fiery freeway crash after their prom last weekend was forced to cancel today’s funeral because the coroner has not released the bodies.

“This is another tragedy for our family,” said the teens’ father, Seung Yang, choking back tears.

“They lived beautiful and died beautiful because they were in their best dress and went to their best party. I’m so angry now,” he said, “because I know in their hearts the coroners know these are my daughters, and they are hanging onto them because of one small thing.”

But Bob Dambacher, spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner, said his office cannot release the bodies until they are positively identified. Both were burned beyond recognition.

Soo Mee Yang, 18, and Soo Jung Yang, 19, were killed instantly early Saturday morning when the car they were passengers in was rear-ended on the Santa Ana Freeway and burst into flames. The sisters, both seniors and honor students at Buena Park High School, had gone to their prom in the Waterfront Hilton at Huntington Beach and had been told to come straight home afterward, Yang said.

Instead they went to a late-night party in Los Angeles County, he said.

They were driving home from that party with a male friend about 5:30 a.m. when the car was involved in a minor traffic accident with a pickup truck in the fast lane of the southbound freeway in East Los Angeles, said Officer Louis Gutierrez, spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

While the two drivers stopped to exchange insurance information, the car the sisters waited in was struck from the rear by another car. The teen-agers’ car exploded, killing the Yangs, Gutierrez said.

The driver who crashed into them was treated at a nearby hospital for minor injuries and released. He was not cited. Neither of the drivers was injured. Yang said the family had planned a funeral for this afternoon but canceled it when the coroner’s office would not confirm the sisters’ identities.

Yang insists that the coroner’s office is being unreasonable. He said he gave the office chest X-rays and photographs of both his daughters. No dental X-rays are available, he said.

“I gave them pictures of my daughters’ smiling faces,” he said. “It’s so simple, so clear, but they say they have a lot of cases and would not tell me when they will release my daughters’ bodies.”

Dambacher said his office does expect to identify the sisters after more tests, but he would not speculate when. The office also denied Yang’s request to view the bodies.

“These are charred bodies; you can’t look at them and know who they are,” he said.

The sisters moved to Buena Park from their native Korea with their mother and older sister in March, 1990. Their father moved here three years earlier to start an import-export business in Buena Park.

Soo Jung Yang was graduating June 11, but her sister had planned to stay at the high school another year to improve her English, Principal Christine Hoffman said.