EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : The Stories of Some of the Victims of the Temblor

By Doug Smith, John Johnson, Abigail Goldman, David Colker and Miguel Bustillo

Jan. 23, 1994 12 AM PT

Times staff writers

The Los Angeles County coroner has attributed 55 deaths to the earthquake and its aftermath. Here is a look at some of the victims:

OLGA ROBLES URIBE

Olga Uribe, 26, had followed her family’s piecemeal migration from Michoacan, Mexico, in search of work. Most of the family, along with Olga’s 10-month-old child, Jovanni, lived in a small house in Pasadena.

On Monday morning, Olga started work at 4 a.m. at a Wendy’s restaurant in Canyon Country. After the quake, she and her sister accepted a ride home from the manager.

On San Fernando Road south of Sepulveda, they crossed a fissure in the pavement. 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.

“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.”

LIONEL VENTURA

His mother has been praying for an act of God, but of a different sort.

Lionel Ventura, 21, had been in a coma since Dec. 17, when he was hurt in an automobile accident. Chances for recovery were slight, but his mother had not lost hope.

Then Holy Cross Hospital called. “The doctor tell me that my son expired,” said Nercida Ventura. The respirator keeping Ventura alive stopped when the earthquake interrupted the electric power.

His mother had a premonition on Dec. 17 when Lionel left her house 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.”

KAROL RUNNINGS

Her son and daughter had asked her to move to Phoenix with them, but Karol Runnings, 48, had a boyfriend and an apartment overlooking landscaped grounds and a stream.

She had lived upstairs, 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 an early morning 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, whose trailer he had lived in for nine months.

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

He had gone fishing recently 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 oven struck him in the head.

NORMAN H. COLE

“A working little guy,” in the words of his 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 Lockheed Corp. 10 years ago, Cole volunteered at the Wilkinson Multipurpose Senior Center.

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

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 inside to search for his own flashlight, climbing over a fallen dresser, said his stepdaughter, Cathy Feldman of West Hills.

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

ANGELINE (ANN) CERONE

She moved from Rochester, N.Y., in 1963 to be near her son Bill and his children.

Ann Cerone, 80, and her husband, Daniel, once lived up the street from the site of the Northridge Meadows apartment complex. They moved in as soon as the complex 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 family 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.

Divorced, 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.’ ”

CONCHA QUINTANAR

Migrating from Sonora, Mexico, 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 shaken but undamaged house and sat Concha in a chair on the sidewalk.

“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 Hospital and is doing well.

EVELYNN B. HENSON

Arriving from Taylorville, Ill., in 1961, Evelynn B. Henson brought 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 had 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 sit back and let it burn.”

Henson was 92.

BEATRICE RESKIN

She was planning to leave the Northridge Meadows apartments, but not with much joy.

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

“She was going to move to Arizona to be near me,” said Marcee Murray, one of her daughters. “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 the Star of David ring she always wore.

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 of them would survive.

“He was so excited about getting the apartment,” said his older brother, Leobardo.

Manuel was born in Mexico and came to the United States in 1978. “He always had straight A’s or B’s,” Leobardo said. “He had many certificates, many awards, honors.”

During his first semester at CSUN, he lived in a dorm, but he thought that if he had his own place with other students, he could save money.

He moved in with Jaime Reyes, 19, and Myrna Velasquez, 18, who Leobardo said were a couple. The other student, not yet identified, survived.

On Monday morning, Manuel’s parents turned on the television soon after the earthquake struck. Pictures from the collapsed apartment house began early. “My father knew that was the building, because he was there to help Manuel move in,” Leobardo said.

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 Bergantzel moved into the Granada Hills neighborhood in 1968, Pearl Carr, a sometime secretary at MGM and sometime screenwriter, already lived around the corner.

Another neighbor had found Carr after the quake, and pulled her out from under a dresser. She then sat down in a lawn chair on the sidewalk.

Two neighbors drove Carr to the hospital, but brought her home when the hospital wouldn’t admit her for a hip injury. As Carr sat in the vehicle, 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 I 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 selling cars for some years, but Cecilia was still the energetic office manager for a small company in Canoga Park, known to telephone customers for her sexy 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.

Burlington, 91, and her sister, Madeleine Hughes, both lived in the apartment complex for the elderly on Sherman Way in Reseda.

Valle found Burlington, 91, in her room with furniture strewn about her bed. Nothing hit her. Valle said she believes that the earthquake scared her to death.

DARLA RAE ENOS

She would have been busy today. Her job 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 here from Montana five years ago and married James Enos. Her husband recently had joined the Kaping company as a construction worker.

They were having an early cup of coffee on the couch in their Northridge Meadows apartment. They were thrown in different directions. Trapped under rubble, he saw a tremendous flash of light, and cried out for his wife. She did not answer.

Among the others who died:

* Sharon Englar, 58

* Phil Englar, 62, Northridge Meadows

* Leonard Glasser, in his 60s

* 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