Deaths End Dream to Return Home : Tragedy: Orchard manager was working hard to be able to bring his family back to Mexico. But he underestimated the power of the raging floodwaters.

Avocado grove manager Victor Arellanes figured he knew the rugged hills west of here as well as anyone, but the vagaries of its ravine washes were something even he did not respect.

When the rain poured unmercifully last weekend, flooding the lowlands in town, Arellanes waved off the warnings of a friend standing on the side of the road and decided to forge the wash that crossed De Luz Road in the hills above town.

With his wife, two young children and a good friend in the cab, Arellanes nudged his four-wheel-drive pickup truck into the water. And just like that, the eight-foot-deep torrent took command, overturning the truck three times and crushing its roof.

The vehicle was found Sunday morning, 50 yards below the road, crumpled against the oaks that provide the backdrop for million-dollar estate homes and horse pastures. Inside were the bodies of Arellanes, 31, his wife of four years, Faustina Martha Arellanes, 20, their 3-year-old daughter, Martha Yarely Arellanes, and friend Margaro Banos, 26, of Escondido.

Rescue workers were looking Monday for the body of 3 1/2-week-old Eddie Arellanes, presumed to have been swept downstream by the 45-m.p.h. waters of rain-swollen Murrieta Creek.

Monday, as emergency crews and townsfolk watched the rise and fall of Murrieta Creek with each downpour, family and friends gathered somberly just a block above flood-whipped historic Old Town to mourn the loss of the family. They reconciled the tragedy with weak smiles and shrugs. It has not sunk in yet, one relative said. They cannot all be dead. “I still can’t get it in my head that it’s true,” said Arellanes’ brother-in-law, Victor Ugalde, a landscaper and handyman who lives in Temecula.

Arellanes, his friends said, was working hard to make enough money to return to the Mexican state of Guerrero by the end of the year. He had not been home for six years and he could hardly contain the excitement of showing off his two youngsters and settling down with his family once and for all. He never complained about his job caring for the avocado grove because, by his measure, it had provided him a good life.

“They were such very happy people--joking, easygoing,” said Ugalde, who is married to Faustina Arellanes’ sister, Julia.

Relatives and friends said it was not unlike Arellanes to try to forge the impromptu river that crossed De Luz Road. He had done it before, in smaller rainstorms, and this time the water was just another hurdle, not a roadblock, to getting home for dinner and riding out the storm.

“They didn’t ask for much,” family friend Liz Cervantes said of the couple. “They didn’t ask for any more of life than what they had.”

Arellanes was proud of his work, Cervantes said. “He loved to pick avocados. This guy wanted to beat everybody else,” she said. “He knew just the right size to pick, and he’d always be the one who’d pick the most bins.”

The past four years had been spent raising his family and living, reasonably comfortably, in a mobile home in the 20-acre avocado grove owned by Don Nielsen of Anaheim.

“He was such a superior worker,” Nielsen said. “That’s why I had kept him on for more than four years. We had hired other workers in the past, but they were disappointing to us. But Victor, he took a lot of personal pride in the grove. He’d show us what he had done to improve the size of the avocados. We made him our on-site property manager.”

As boss and manager, theirs was a comfortable, even affable, relationship. Arellanes would tease Nielsen about his poor Spanish, and a year ago, Nielsen and his wife treated the family to a Christmas outing at Disneyland.

“I would ask him about his dreams, but he said he was content,” Nielsen said.

On Monday, the family talked of hoping to find little Eddie’s body and of maybe setting up a trust fund at a local bank so the bodies of Arellanes and his family could be returned to Mexico for burial.