Autopsy Confirms Heatstroke Killed Football Player : Weather: Coach of San Fernando High senior is said to have followed district policy for activity on hot days.

An autopsy Friday confirmed that a 17-year-old San Fernando High School senior, who friends said went out for football to avoid social pressures to join a gang, died of heatstroke after practicing in 102-degree weather.

Sergio Echevarria died Thursday, 36 hours after he collapsed following an hour of running and other exercises in the midday sun.

The cause of death was heatstroke, and tests were continuing for any other factors, such as drugs or alcohol use, coroner’s spokesman Scott Carrier said.

A spokeswoman at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills said Echevarria was in critical condition when he arrived there shortly after he collapsed at 1:45 p.m., about 30 minutes after the end of practice. He suffered three seizures in the emergency room and lapsed into a coma, but regained sufficient consciousness on Wednesday to speak with relatives. He died about 2 a.m. Thursday.

The youth’s tearful father, Vicente Echevarria, said Friday that he was called to the school from his job at an auto repair shop, found his son with a nurse and then accompanied him to the hospital by ambulance.

Echevarria said he wants to see the autopsy report before judging who was responsible for his son’s death, but was angry that practice had not been canceled because of the weather.

“It was really hot. . . . They shouldn’t let them play, they shouldn’t let them practice,” he said.

Echevarria said he will have to sell his pickup truck to get $3,000 to send his son’s body for burial in the family’s home state of Michoacan, Mexico, and then would try to sell the family’s house in Pacoima to return to Mexico to live.

San Fernando High football Coach Tom Hernandez said Tuesday’s practice began at 12:20 p.m. and was to last 2 1/2 hours, but was shortened to about 45 minutes because of the heat. He and two assistants were watching the 65 players, who were not wearing pads, and no one seemed overly tired, Hernandez said.

“We were shocked by what happened,” the coach said. “I thought we were being real careful. I don’t understand what happened. In the Valley, 100 degrees is common, even in September.”

Assistant Principal Paul Swanson said Hernandez had “used good judgment” by shortening practice and that the session fell within a school district policy, issued in May, of avoiding heat stress during school activities in hot weather.

District spokesman Shel Erlich said the handling of the incident will be reviewed to be sure that the policy was followed.

The policy calls for school officials to use “extreme caution” in supervising students’ physical activities when the temperature exceeds 95 degrees. If the relative humidity is below 50%, activities can continue if they are limited in duration and intensity and are closely monitored.

The relative humidity in Van Nuys on Tuesday afternoon was 25%, according to the National Weather Service in Los Angeles.

Other guidelines, including those developed in a respected research program at Ohio State University, recommend some curtailment of strenuous physical activity at temperatures over 80 degrees.

Dr. Gary Green, the assistant physician for UCLA athletic teams, said heat exhaustion deaths in sports are rare in Southern California because the area usually has low humidity. Those that do “usually occur at the beginning of the season before people are acclimated to the heat,” he said.

The San Fernando High team was one of 17 Los Angeles schools in the San Fernando Valley that held drills Tuesday despite the heat.

Other football coaches said they are constantly aware of the possibility of such a tragedy and do what they can to prevent it. “Any coach who blows a whistle fears this kind of thing every day,” said Coach Bob Francola of Kennedy High School in Granada Hills.

Van Nuys High School Coach George Engbrecht held practice Tuesday, but canceled a conditioning workout and running drills because of the heat. “I could really feel it . . . so we just ended it,” he said.

Dr. Helen Hale, the district’s director of student medical services, said heat illnesses or strokes can happen to anyone who does not drink enough fluids or who is not used to exercising in hot whether.

“No one is invulnerable to this whole thing,” she said. “It’s so easy to focus on a person who made a kid run. At this point we don’t know anything . . . but I do know that all of us are subject to this.”

Heatstroke results when perspiration stops and the body temperature soars, which causes the kidneys and liver to stop functioning and dehydration to set in. Other organs then begin shutting down, which can quickly result in death.

The National Center for the Study of Sudden Death in Athletes, based in Indianapolis, studied 411 sports-related deaths between 1989 and 1991 and found that 76 were football-related. At least 10 of the deaths were caused by heatstroke.

Robert Macias, a 16-year-old junior at San Fernando High, said he has lived next door to Echevarria for four years and that until six months ago his friend was “hanging around a lot with gang members, but he was not really a gangbanger.”

Echevarria, who was 6 feet tall and weighed 185 pounds, decided to go out for football as a senior to meet a new group of friends and “start a new life,” Macias said. The two friends attended conditioning sessions regularly all summer and Echevarria never showed any signs of suffering from the heat, he said.

Junior Montoya, 17, another friend of Echevarria’s at San Fernando High, said the “pull of the gangs is real strong, because they make you popular.”

But, he noted: “If you play high school sports, that’s another way to be popular with the girls . . . That’s why he joined the team.

“When we would be hanging out, he would see a guy go by in a Mercedes and say that’s what he wanted,” Montoya said. “But he knew that you had to work in school and stay away from the gangs to get like that.”

Echevarria’s father said his son got excellent grades and wanted to go to college. He disputed the friends’ contention that his son was being drawn toward gang life.

“He never went out in the street with his friends,” Vicente Echevarria said. “He didn’t like that. He went to school, then home. He didn’t keep bad company. I don’t even think he had a girlfriend. He didn’t think about nothing else but sports and his studies.”

Echevarria, 56, said he plans to return to Mexico with his wife, Carmen, and their surviving child, Julio, 7. Such a move would take Julio away from the drugs so common in their neighborhood and would also allow his wife to be near her family for consolation, he said.

The father said he has not decided whether to file a lawsuit in connection with his son’s death. But he was upset that when he arrived at the school campus, only a nurse, who did not speak Spanish, was with his ailing son.

“If I take legal action . . . it will be to prevent this from happening again,” he said.

Times staff writers Jim Quinn and Paige A. Leech contributed to this story.