Immigrants’ Dreams Also Died in Pickup Truck Crash : Accident: Relatives tell of the victims’ difficult but hopeful journeys to the United States. Many of the 12 dead were from El Salvador and seeking to join family members in the Los Angeles area.

For Miriam Elisabeth Arevalo, everything finally seemed to be falling into place.

She had arranged for family in El Salvador to care for her two children until they could rejoin her someday. Her half sister in Los Angeles had already found Arevalo a job caring for an elderly woman here. Relatives vowed to help her repay the debt of more than $1,000 still owed to the coyote, or smuggler, who organized her 2,000-mile passage from El Salvador to California.

“She would have done well here,” her half sister, Nora Pena, said Wednesday as tears filled her eyes.

Arevalo, 33, was one of 12 who perished when a pickup truck carrying 20 immigrants crashed off Interstate 15 near Barstow on March 9. Also killed was her nephew, Edwin Elenilson Arevalo, 20, who was accompanying her on the journey. Most of the victims were Salvadorans seeking to join their families in the Los Angeles area.

On Wednesday, as relatives made arrangements to ship the bodies back to Central America, mourners gathered at La Placita Roman Catholic Church Downtown to remember three of the victims, whose flower-bedecked, brown metal coffins were arrayed in front of the altar.

“At least my mother is going home now,” said Silvia Guadalupe Alfaro, 23-year-old daughter of Juana Basilia Alfaro, who at 57 was the oldest victim. “The worst is over now,” the sobbing Alfaro said as she sat in the church pew.

Several families plan to hold wakes later this week. Remains are scheduled to be flown back to El Salvador starting today.

TACA, the San Salvador-based airline, has agreed to ship the bodies back without cost. Many families, fearing that violence may accompany Sunday’s national elections in El Salvador, are eager to return with their loved ones before then.

The emerging stories of the dead say much about the separation of families caused by the mass exodus of people from Central America and Mexico to the United States.

Gloria Alicia Garcia Barrientos, 36, left California and returned to her native El Salvador last month intending to bring back her son, whom she had not seen in two years; the mother died but the boy, Odir Garcia, 10, survived.

“She wanted her boy to be with her,” said a disconsolate Berta Alicia de Barrientos, the mother of the dead woman and grandmother of the injured boy.

During Wednesday’s service, the exhausted Odir sat in a front pew, his head resting on the arm of his sister, Janet Garcia, 20. Another brother, Emerson, 16, is still in El Salvador. A color photograph displayed by the coffin showed the proud mother and her three children.

Another victim, Aida Hernandez de Zamora, 34, had gone back to El Salvador last month to visit her two daughters, Vanesa, 8, and Raquel, 10. She had not seen them in five years.

“I told her not to go, that maybe we could work out a way where she could get permission to leave and come back,” recalled her brother, Feliciano Ordonez, 37, a resident of Los Angeles. He saw his sister off at the airport before she left for El Salvador. “I never imagined that would be the last time that I’d see her alive,” the shocked brother recalled during an interview last week at the morgue in San Bernardino.

Juana Basilia Alfaro, who lived in El Salvador, was eager to see her daughter, a North Hollywood resident, after January’s earthquake. The mother had been repeatedly denied a visitor’s visa to enter the United States, the daughter said.

Some of the victims, like Jose Rosales, 20, who is recovering from injuries, had been to California before. Others, like Arevalo and her nephew, were making their first trips north, seeking opportunities not available in their war-weary homeland.

“It’s very difficult to live now in El Salvador,” Miguel Angel Miron Garcia, the widower of Arevalo, said on Wednesday. He lives in Rockville, Md.

In Salvadoran enclaves from Boston to Los Angeles, news of the tragedy spread quickly. But few imagined that their loved ones were among the dead. The arrival times of friends and family from home are rarely precise in the immigrant nether world of coyotes, safe houses and clandestine border crossings.

“We knew about the accident, but we never thought our sister was involved,” said Rene Saul Arevalo, brother of Miriam Arevalo.

Crossing the border and traveling without papers are accepted, albeit risky, parts of the immigrant experience.

“We all came originally through the border,” said Pena, the half sister of Arevalo. “We all know the risk that one runs.”

Identifying the dead has been a lengthy process. Few victims carried identification, as is often the case among illegal immigrants who want to conceal their identities in case they are arrested. Often, the undocumented have only slips of paper with the telephone numbers of relatives or acquaintances in the north.

As of Wednesday, nine of the 12 deceased had been identified. Eight of those were Salvadoran; the other, Rigoberto Ordonez, 24, was Guatemalan.

Each day, immigrants show up at the morgue in San Bernardino, hoping against hope that the unidentified are not their relatives. Many leave relieved; others are not so lucky.

Of the eight injured, four remain hospitalized. The driver, now identified as Wenndever Ordonez, 23, of Los Angeles, is being held at the jail ward of the San Bernardino County Medical Center. He is being investigated for vehicular manslaughter.

The Central American Resource Center, a social service organization known as Carecen, has set up a fund to help families offset costs of funerals, transportation and other expenses. Donations may be sent to Carecen Barstow Victims Fund, 668 Bonnie Brae St., Los Angeles 90057. Information is available by calling (213) 483-6868.

Times staff writer Tom Gorman in Riverside contributed to this story.