Boiler Blamed for Fatal Explosion at El Torito : Tragedy: The two daughters of Antonio De Santiago, a serious but fun-loving man, say they lost their best friend.

Mireya and Eloisa De Santiago say they lost their best friend on Sunday. They lost their father.

Mireya, 11, and Eloisa, 14, spent much of Monday crying for Antonio De Santiago, a 39-year-old bartender who was killed in an explosion the day before at a Newport Beach restaurant. As his relatives and friends struggled to make sense of his death Sunday, many used the same words to remember him.

“Everybody, everybody loved him,” said Mireya, sobbing. Both girls, De Santiago’s only children, wore black as they leaned back on a worn brown corduroy couch in an Anaheim apartment and offered their memories, piece by piece, to relatives and friends seated around them.

“He’d take us to the park, to the movies, even the video arcade,” said Eloisa, who goes by Cesy to her friends and family. Her father--who separated from the girls’ mother five years ago--picked them up from school every day and saw them on weekend visits to their mother’s apartment.

“Look at Cesy, she’s the spitting image of him,” said Gustavo Fernandez, 26, De Santiago’s brother-in-law. Eloisa grinned shyly, tilted her head to one side and nodded.

Her father, who moved to California from Mexico more than 18 years ago, was serious but fun-loving.

“He’d play around with us and tell us jokes,” said Eloisa, who will soon start ninth grade at Brookhurst Junior High School. “But he was also always there to listen to us and talk about anything.”

Friends were amazed that De Santiago was able to squeeze all he had to do each day into 24 hours. He tended bar at two restaurants--full time at El Torito Grill in Newport Beach, where the explosion occurred Sunday, and part time at El Ranchito in Santa Ana.

De Santiago worked hard, Eloisa said, because he was trying to raise money for her upcoming quinceanera , a traditional fancy 15th birthday party. It was nothing new for the Fullerton man, who sent money back to his family in Mexico. He was the oldest of 12 children, and “always acted like a father to me,” said his 18-year-old brother, Armando.

Although he supported his daughters and relatives, De Santiago had lived with a girlfriend, Maria de Lourdes Vivanco, for the past four years.

“Every morning, he’d leave for work and give me a kiss,” Vivanco, 24, remembered sadly during an interview at her apartment. “But Sunday morning, he was in a hurry and just started to leave.

“I asked him, ‘Are you just going to leave like that?’ ” she said. “He turned around and blew me a kiss--the last one.”

De Santiago was like a father to Vivanco’s daughter, Carla. The couple hoped to build a house in the Mexican city of Tecate and start a small store there, she added.

The bartender was fanatical about baseball and boxing, favoring Mexican boxing hero Julio Cesar Chavez, said De Santiago’s 33-year-old wife, Maria Luisa De Santiago. She clasped her hands in her lap and tried to keep from crying.

“He liked the Dodgers,” she said. “I remember once, when we just got married, he took me to a game and I had no idea what was going on,” she said, cracking a slight smile.

The couple met in their hometown of Zacatecas, Mexico. But they did not marry until they met again--across the border, she said.

Family members said Antonio De Santiago loved to tinker with cars, and was trying to fix up a blue 1966 Mustang in time for Eloisa’s birthday. He also read Spanish-language serial comic books and was a news hound who routinely offered to friends his thoughts on politics, albeit quietly.

“He was always willing to work, he always was dependable,” said Rafael Alfonzo, a manager at El Torito Grill.

Alfonzo, who worked with De Santiago at several restaurants over the past decade, recalled that the blast victim worked his way up from being a busboy to the coveted bartender job a year ago.

“I feel guilty because I’m the one who hired him,” Alfonzo said. “I’m so sorry.”

On Monday, Mireya and Eloisa were not looking for anyone to blame for their father’s death. They were just hoping--impossibly--that their father might somehow come back.

“On Friday, I saw him for the last time and I told him I love him,” Mireya said. “He knows that.”

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this report.