Families Mourn Loved Ones Killed in Crash : Tragedy: Five of the 12 dead have been identified. Relatives are given grim chore of identifying bodies, while elsewhere, others wait for news.

Fifty-seven-year-old Juana Basilia Alfaro worried about her daughter’s safety ever since that big earthquake in January, so she left her home in El Salvador for the long journey to Los Angeles to make sure her Silvia was safe.

Quite by chance, she joined other immigrants who had crossed the border near Nogales, Ariz., on Tuesday afternoon. She squeezed herself with 19 others inside a pickup truck that had parked along a rural highway. The group had pooled their money and offered the driver $600 for overnight passage to Los Angeles.

At sunrise the next morning, as the truck traveled past Barstow, the driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel. The vehicle drifted off Interstate 15 and smashed into an earthen drainage culvert.

Of the 20 people crammed inside the pickup, 12 were killed. The other eight--including the driver--were injured. One of the fatalities carried the address of Alfaro’s daughter in Los Angeles.

At the request of the San Bernardino County coroner’s office, Silvia Guadalupe Alfaro of Los Angeles made the dreaded drive Thursday morning and confirmed her worst fears: Her mother was one of the dead.

Because Juana Basilia Alfaro had been unsuccessful in getting a visitor’s visa during several trips to the U.S. Consulate, she apparently decided to make the trek north without immigration documents.

“My mother was coming because she loved me, to take care of me,” Silvia told KVEA-TV outside the morgue. She had not seen her mother in several years.

Silvia spent the rest of the day with a psychologist. And 2,000 miles away, a country recovering from a dozen years of bloody civil war--a conflict that sent 1 million of its people fleeing north--mourned the loss of some of its children.

“This is a national tragedy in El Salvador,” said Gerardo Sol Mixco, the consul general for El Salvador in Los Angeles.

As the day grew longer, family after family drove up to the bunker-like coroner’s office in San Bernardino. In communal embraces, in tears and in whispers, one by one, families went inside to face death.

By late afternoon, the bodies of four Salvadorans had been identified by relatives. Sol Mixco said they were Alfaro; Aida Hernandez, 34; Gloria Alicia Barrientos, 36, and Heber Noe Penate, 26.

The body of a fifth person, a Guatemalan, also had been identified, Sol Mixco said, although he did not know the name.

Details of the tragic ride were offered Thursday by Jose Rosales, 20, whose survival was characterized as a miracle by his physician at San Bernardino County Medical Center.

Rosales said he and the other travel-weary immigrants, most from El Salvador, happened to fall into step as a group earlier this week. They walked across the border and came upon the man with a pickup.

Two men joined the driver in the front seat, and a woman sat in the lap of the man closest to the passenger door. In the bed of the truck, under a camper shell, the other 16 travelers hunkered down for the last leg of their journey.

Rosales said he could recall little about the crash Wednesday morning, which occurred after 12 hours on the road. When he awoke on the hard desert floor, he tried to wake up the person lying next to him. He soon realized the person was dead. Then Rosales passed out again.

“I came to better my life,” he said, eyes wet with emotion as a knot of reporters crowded around his hospital bed.

His left leg, right ankle and collarbone were broken, and his jaw was scarred.

Dr. Dev Gnanadev said the young man would probably make a full recovery, although his immediate future was unclear.

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles said the survivors would be interviewed about their immigration status.

INS investigators have not yet interviewed the driver because he remains in critical condition.

Times staff writer Tom Gorman contributed to this story. McDonnell reported from San Bernardino and Nazario from Los Angeles.