Blast at O.C. Eatery Kills 1, Injures 5 : Victims: Debris and darkness trap the injured, who mourn the death of prized bartender.

Stunned by falling roof timbers and trapped in the debris that was once her office, Rosa Ortiz could not imagine a life past Sunday morning.

It was then that the roof came crashing down at the El Torito Grill, smashing against her left cheek and pinning the slight bookkeeper against an office desk.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I could die in here,’ ” she said in the aftermath of Sunday’s explosion, which devastated her place of business and killed one man. Only then, she said, came familiar yells from co-workers, somewhere beyond the splintered wood and piles of plaster.

“Where’s Rosa?” the workers asked each other. “Where’s Rosa?”

Encouraged by the yells from her friends, the 22-year-old Santa Ana resident kicked off her shoes, squeezed through the debris, and climbed over her desk. Light shone through a gap in a splintered door, and she tumbled through the rubble toward it.

“I went through the door, and I saw Gilberto (another employee) and he asked me if I was OK,” she recalled. “Then I realized how lucky I was.”

The throbbing black-and-blue welts that mark her cheek are a reminder of the piece of wood that struck her face. “It could have hit me higher and taken out my eye,” she said.

Perhaps most startling to Ortiz was that she never heard the explosion nor saw any sign of trouble in the seconds before.

“I just felt the ceiling close in,” Ortiz said. “I thought the air conditioner was falling on my head.”

For a short moment, the situation was so unexpected that she could not believe it was happening to her.

“One minute I was there, looking at the (accounting) books, and then I was trapped there--like somebody decided to play a trick on me,” she said.

Obviously relieved by her escape, Ortiz also mourned for Antonio De Santiago, 36, a bartender who was trapped and killed in the blast. “He was so respectful,” Ortiz recalled. “He was so quiet, everyone called him Silencio .”

De Santiago was such a prized employee, a restaurant manager said, that he won the “Employee of the Quarter” award three times in his two years at the bar.

Ortiz praised the firefighters who treated her in the street outside the restaurant, where she and four other employees were placed on back boards.

For another survivor, 41-year-old busboy Pedro Gutierrez, the explosion trapped him in sudden darkness.

“When it happened, I couldn’t see anything,” Gutierrez said in an interview hours after the blast.

“One wall had fallen and then another,” he said, adding that he felt trapped until he crawled toward a small opening that led to the street. “As I reached the door, I fell because my legs failed me.”

Gutierrez said he remained calm in the seconds following the explosion, until he reached the pavement outdoors and looked back at the crumbled building.

“Then I started trembling,” he remembered.

Given his proximity to the blast, Gutierrez shook his head and considered his good fortune:

“For what happened, I came out OK.”

Gutierrez is from a small village near Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, but now lives in Newport Beach.

Ortiz said most of the restaurant’s employees come from small towns in Mexico.

“We’re all pretty much from the same place,” she said.

Baldomero Rodriguez, a chef at the grill, also made it out, but with some injuries. According to other employees, Rodriguez was hit in the back by a pot of black beans.

Executive General Manager Marshall G. Wade Jr. said Rodriguez has worked at the restaurant for five years, and is “an excellent employee.” Eugenio Guerrero, a waiter, and Victor Alcala--a busboy who had been at the restaurant for only a few months--were also hospitalized, Wade said.

“You get to know these people,” Wade said. “They’re all like brothers and sisters to each other.”

Ortiz, in her fourth month at the restaurant, said she often relied on De Santiago to help her handle other restaurant chores.

“He would say, ‘Rosa, don’t worry, I’ll try to do my best,’ ” she said.

Wade said De Santiago “did everything you asked of him. He didn’t complain.”