DANGER IN TRANSIT : It Took but a Moment for 4 to Meet Fiery Death

Kristi Ann Mercurio’s last phone call was typical of her--warm and upbeat. She had just arrived at Ontario International Airport with her family after a Christmas holiday in Idaho.

“Don’t worry, Gram,” she told her grandmother in Coeur D’Alene. “We’re OK.”

A few minutes later, Mercurio died a haunting death at the age of 36. She drove her vehicle into the darkened path of a gasoline tanker-trailer blocking the San Bernardino Freeway. Her husband and two children were also killed in the explosion.

The late-night accident three years ago stunned Glendora, where the Mercurios lived, in its stark illustration of how dangerous tanker-trailers can be.

According to interviews and accident reports, the chain-reaction tragedy began in Claremont on the night of Dec. 27, 1989, after the brakes apparently malfunctioned on a tanker-trailer in the freeway’s westbound lanes.

After some of the wheels locked, the tanker went out of control and skidded across the freeway, coming to rest upright but facing east. The trailer flipped onto its side and hit the median.

Mercurio decided to steer around the accident by swerving to the left onto the median. Instead, her car hit the darkened trailer, filled with 1,100 gallons of gasoline; it exploded.

The four occupants had little chance of escape, the coroner’s report said. Besides Mercurio, those killed were her husband, Alan, 41; their son, Anthony, 9; and Brandie Renee Rooker, 17, her daughter from a previous marriage.

Police theorized that Mercurio may not have been able to see the overturned trailer because she was blinded by the truck’s headlights, which had been left on. The tanker driver, Clinzell Washington, told police that he was in back of the truck checking for leaks--there were none--when he heard the crash.

Amid a flurry of charges between the victims’ family and the trucking company, Dedicated Transport in Montebello, about who was to blame, the CHP faulted neither Washington nor Mercurio.

Yet Mercurio’s mother insists that such tanker-trailers should be banned--as they once were by many urban states east of the Mississippi River.

“You don’t hear about those accidents in this state,” said Bonnie J. Gallaer, who now lives in Ohio, where gasoline tanker-trailers are rare, though legal. “This has to stop,” she added, her voice choked with grief. “That accident has taken so much of my life.”

One expert who agrees with Gallaer is Edward E. Kynaston, who wrote a report for the California Highway Patrol 11 years ago that pointed out the dangers. Trailers, he wrote, are “particularly susceptible to overturn.”

“If I had my preference,” Kynaston said in a recent interview, “I would not allow them on the road either.”

A postscript:

Mercurio and her family probably would have been home at the time of the accident had their plane from Idaho not been delayed for two hours. They were buried together in a single grave in Glendora after a funeral attended by more than 1,000 people.