EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Death Came in Many Ways for Valley’s Victims

With the epicenter of Monday’s quake in Northridge, the majority of the victims were residents of the San Fernando Valley. Of the 55 deaths attributed to the earthquake, 36 occurred in the Valley, and more than a third were in the single infamous building on Reseda Boulevard. Here is a look at some of the victims:

OLGA ROBLES URIBE Defying the hazards Monday morning, Consuelo Uribe drove to Valencia to tell her younger sister, Olga, that everyone was OK. It was Olga who wouldn’t be.

Olga Uribe, 26, had followed her family’s piecemeal migration from Michoacan, Mex., in search of work. Consuelo came first, 15 years ago, then a brother and a sister, then Olga. Their mother and father came last. The family, along with Olga’s 10-month-old baby, Jovanni, lived in a small house in Pasadena.

The sisters worked in Canyon Country, Olga an assistant manager at Wendy’s, where she had worked nine years. On Monday morning, she started at 4 a.m.

After the earthquake, Consuelo drove her mother and father to a relative’s home in Van Nuys, then on to see Olga. At 1 p.m., they tried to drive home, but were turned back. They went to Wendy’s to wait.

At 7 p.m., the manager suggested he could take the sisters home. On San Fernando Road, just south of Sepulveda, they crossed a fissure in the pavement about the width of a car bumper with a two-inch rise on one side.

It seemed to Consuelo that the earth shook again as they hit the crack. The car brushed a tree then rolled two or three times, stopping with its wheels in the air.

After the manager and other motorists righted the car, Consuelo unfastened her sister’s seat belt and tried to save her with words of hope.

“I talked to her,” she said. “I told her to wait for her baby. I said, ‘Your baby is here. Your baby is waiting.’ She was breathing.

“When I was talking to her, ‘Olga, your baby is waiting for you,’ she was breathing more. After a while she didn’t breathe no more. I tried to save my sister, but I couldn’t.”

MANUEL SANDOVAL It was their first night in the new apartment.

Twenty-four-year-old Manuel Sandoval, the pride of his immigrant family, had rented it with three other Cal State Northridge students. Only one would survive their first 24 hours.

His father had come up from Wilmington on Thursday to help Manuel move in. Manuel spent part of the weekend with his parents and five siblings, then said goodby.

“He was so excited about getting the apartment,” said his older brother, Leobardo. “It was the last time the family saw him.”

He was born in Mexico and came to the United States with his family in 1978.

“He always had straight A’s or Bs,” Leobardo said. “He had many certificates, many awards, honors.”

Manuel graduated from Banning High School and went on to Los Angeles Harbor College. His father, who was the family’s sole support with his job at a fast-food restaurant, could not help pay the tuition. Manuel paid his own way.

“He worked, always,” Leobardo said. “He had jobs, he would tutor other students.”

From Harbor College he went to CSUN, where he started last semester. His goal was to become a math teacher.

During his first semester, which began in September, he lived in a dormitory room, but he thought that if he had his own place with other students, he could save money.

The other students who joined him in the venture were Jaime Reyes, 19, and Myrna Velasquez, 18, who Leobardo said were a couple. The other student, who has not been fully identified by authorities, survived.

On Monday morning, Manuel’s parents turned on the television soon after the earthquake struck. Coverage of the tragedy at the apartment house began early.

“My father knew that was the building, because he was there to help Manuel move in,” Leobardo said.

LIONEL VENTURA His mother was praying for an Act of God, but of a different sort.

He had been in a coma since Dec. 17, when he was in an automobile accident. Chances for recovery were slight, but she had not lost hope.

The call that came on Monday morning from Holy Cross Hospital was not the one she had prayed for.

“The doctor tell me that my son expired,” said Nercida Ventura. “That’s what they say--expired. He was gone.”

The respirator keeping Lionel Ventura, 21, alive stopped when the earthquake interrupted the electric power. Nurses immediately gave him CPR, but couldn’t revive him.

She had a premonition back on Dec. 17 when Lionel left her house, where he lived with his girlfriend and 2-month-old daughter, in the company of two men she didn’t know.

“He told me, ‘Nothing is going to happen,’ ” she said. “He gave me a kiss and said, ‘Mom, I love you,’ and he left.”

She heard nothing until Jan. 6, when the police called to tell her that he had been in the hospital since the day she last saw him.

“At the hospital, they tell me that the police chased the car because it was stolen,” she said. “I never found out anything about the accident.”

She said that doctors said her son would never recover his mental faculties even if he came out of the coma, but she remained hopeful. In recent weeks, she said there were signs he was recovering.

“He started lifting his hand,” she said. “He open his eye and close it. He was starting to react.

“I believe in God, and I pray for a miracle.”

Now Nercida Ventura is praying to find a way to pay for his burial.

“They tell me that even with prices cut, it will cost $2,503,” she said. “I don’t have that money.”

KAROL RUNNINGS Her son and daughter had asked her to move to Phoenix with them, but Karol Runnings, 48, had a boyfriend and a window overlooking a landscaped stream.

She had lived upstairs before, but moved to the first floor as soon as it was vacant.

“She loved her little apartment, and she wasn’t going to leave it,” said Julie Tindall.

Her son, Bill Runnings, was working graveyard shift when he saw the Northridge Meadows Apartments on television.

At 4:30 that afternoon, Karol’s former husband met his son and daughter at the airport. By 9, they stood on the sidewalk before TV cameras, pleading for scraps of information.

It wasn’t until 3 a.m. that a cousin called from the morgue with the news.

ADAM SLOTNIK The Pizzeria Uno opened in November at Northridge Fashion Center, and Adam Slotnik, 28, was sent by the parent company in Boston to be its manager.

“He’s been an entrepreneur all of his life, since he was 5,” said Lisa Costigan, friend of the franchisee, Glenn Miller. “He wanted to work really hard for the next 10 years and retire young. He wanted to live the good life.”

He died in the Northridge Meadows Apartments.

TED PETER FICHTNER On the street in Chatsworth that took him in, Ted Peter Fichtner, 28, was “our local hero,” said Margaret Foreman, in whose trailer he had lived for nine months.

“Ted was never too busy to help anybody,” Foreman said. “Even little kids brought their bikes to him if it needed air.”

Recently, he went fishing with his brother-in-law, William Henderson, and caught an 18-inch trout.

“I think that was one of the happiest days he ever had,” Henderson said.

As he tried to get out of bed Monday, a microwave struck him in the head.

PEARL E. CARR Gladys Bergantzel immediately thought of her ailing 73-year-old friend, alone in the house she had lived in since 1955.

When she moved into the Granada Hills neighborhood in 1968, Pearl Carr, a some-time secretary at MGM and some-time screenwriter, already lived around the corner.

Another neighbor had found Pearl and pulled her out from under a dresser.

Two neighbors drove Carr to the hospital, but brought her home when the hospital wouldn’t admit

her for a hip injury. Bergantzel went to get water for her.

“When I was halfway down to the driveway, she sat up and started waving her arm. I ran and pulled open the car door and said, “What’s wrong?’ “She said, ‘I feel very funny and can’t breathe.’ I had my arms around her and she just went unconscious. We didn’t have any telephone service. I just lowered her back down to the pillow.”

CECILIA AND DAVID PRESSMAN The couple in Apartment 105, both 72, had been married 51 years.

Brooklyn native David Pressman had been retired from used auto sales for some years, but Cecilia was still the energetic office manager for a small company in Canoga Park, known to telephone customers for her attractive voice.

“She was going to try to retire in May,” said one of her two daughters, Elise Kaplan of Granada Hills. “She really liked Ventura.”

The couple were found in their bed in a tight embrace in the Northridge Meadows Apartments.

MARGUERITE BURLINGTON She was a dancer, said Yolanda Valle, manager of the federally subsidized Sherman Park Apartments.

“She was a very active lady, a very happy lady,” Valle said. “All the time when I have a party here, she will always go for it. We are really going to miss her.”

Burlington, 91, and her sister, Madeleine Hughes, both lived in the federally subsidized seniors apartment complex on Sherman Way in Reseda.

Valle found Burlington, 91, in her room with furniture strewn about her bed. Nothing hit her. Valle said she thinks it scared her to death.

DARLA RAE ENOS She would have been busy today. Her job as a damage estimator was surveying buildings for structural damage.

“A person that could really be out helping people perished,” said Ron Agenter, vice president of Kaping Construction in Chatsworth.

Darla Rae Enos, 43, outgoing and a take-charge type, moved from Montana five years ago and married James Enos. Her husband recently joined the company as a construction worker.

They were having an early cup of coffee on the couch in their Northridge Meadows apartment. They were thrown different ways. Trapped under rubble, he saw a tremendous flash of light, and yelled for his wife. She didn’t answer back.

NORMAN H. COLE “A working little guy,” in the eyes of neighbor Howard Zimmerman, Norman Cole, 79, was at it till the end.

He and his wife, Jeanne, migrated from Indiana in 1947, then moved into a new house on Knapp Street in North Hills nine years later. After retiring as an insurance analyst for the Lockheed Corp. 10 years ago, Cole volunteered at the Wilkinson Multipurpose Senior Center.

He kept busy, in spite of a silent heart attack last March. As soon as the earthquake was over, he started cleaning up until he slipped in the kitchen and collapsed.

JERRY BORMAN In the hall outside the second-story Valley Oaks Village apartment in Santa Clarita, a neighbor handed him a flashlight.

As his wife, Catherine, waited, Jerry Borman, 67, went back in to search for his own, said his stepdaughter, Cathy Feldman of West Hills.

“When he came out, he gave the neighbor the flashlight and he collapsed.”

BEATRICE RESKIN She was planning on leaving the Northridge Meadows Apartments, but not with much joy.

Bea Reskin, 71, had retired a month ago from a job as a medical assistant to a doctor in Tarzana.

“She was going to move to Arizona to be near me,” one of her daughters, Marcee Murray said, “or to somewhere that was a little less expensive, maybe a retirement-type place. But she didn’t want to leave her wonderful friends here.”

Murray said her mother was identified by a Jewish star ring she always wore.

ANGELINE (ANN) CERONE She moved from Rochester in 1963 to be near her son, Bill, and his children.

Ann Cerone, 80, and her husband, Daniel, first lived up the street from the future Northridge Meadows apartment complex and moved into it as soon as it was built in the early 1970s.

“She was real tiny,” Bill Cerone said. “Very quiet. She had the sweetest smile, and just lived for her family.”

Bill Cerone worries that the apartment will be demolished before he can retrieve her photographs.

“Some of the most important ones to me are in that building and I really want to get them,” he said.

JERRY GREEN His sister expected him to arrive at her door, half a mile from his home in the Northridge Meadows Apartments, shortly after the earthquake.

Jerry Green, 52, was close to his sister, Sally Sawchuk.

“When he didn’t come here, my husband and daughter went over to the apartment,” she said. “My husband was knocking at Jerry’s window on the first floor. My daughter said to him, ‘Dad, this is the second floor, not the first.’ ”

EVELYNN B. HENSON Arriving from Taylorville, Ill., in 1961, Evelynn B. Henson put one of the first coaches into the new Sunburst Park Mobile Homes on Plummer Street in Chatsworth.

Her daughter, Minetta Dial, followed in 1965, taking the space across the driveway.

Little disturbed the tranquillity of their lives until Monday.

“My husband yelled, ‘Your mother’s house is on fire,’ ” Dial said. “We just couldn’t do anything. It was coming out the doors and the windows. All we could do was . . . let it burn.”

She was 92.

CONCHA QUINTANAR Migrating from Sonora, Mex., in the late 1920s, she settled with her husband in San Fernando.

Twenty years after his death, Concha Quintanar, 83, and her daughter, Yolanda Quintanar, still lived in the little house on Hollister Street where Yolanda and her brother were born. Visiting with them Monday was Concha’s sister, Refugio, 90.

Neighbors helped them out of the undamaged house.

“All she said was that she felt very bad,” Yolanda Quintanar said. “I just thought she fainted, but she never came out of it.”

Refugio was flown in a helicopter to Glendale Adventist and is doing well.

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The Los Angeles County coroner’s office lists 55 deaths that are being reported as earthquake-related. Here are the names of the remainder of those who died:

Sharon Englar, 58; Phil Englar, 62, Northridge Meadows; Leonard Glasser, described as in his 60s, no residence listed; Robert T. Hall, 62, North Hollywood; Edward Lee Horton, 71, Los Angeles; Hannah Kamiya, 75, Los Angeles; Gennady Khytman, 45, West Hollywood; Burton Krell, 59, Northridge; Antonia Munoz, 66; John Nalls, 64, Sherman Oaks; William Pearson, 55, Santa Monica; Madeline Riggins, 92, Panorama City; Maxfield Smith, 62, Marina del Rey; Margarita Vasquez, 90; Rose Weinstein, 75, Northridge; Herbert Wesley, 45, Pico Rivera; Marc Yobs, 32, Sherman Oaks.

David Colker, Abigail Goldman and Miguel Bustillo contributed to this story.