2 Die, 2 Hurt in Car-Truck Crash

Two people were killed and two others seriously injured Saturday night when a car on the westbound Simi Valley Freeway smashed broadside into a pickup truck, sending the car almost completely underneath the truck, authorities said.

Thirty firefighters used two sets of equipment to extricate the two survivors from the wreckage just west of DeSoto Avenue--the driver of the car, described as a man in his 40s, and the driver of the truck, a man in his 30s.

The car’s driver was barely visible under the truck, said spokesman Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

“When paramedics first arrived on the scene . . . all they could see was his shoulders and his head,” Humphrey said. “The rest of the sheet metal was completely entrapping him.”

Humphrey said the force of the collision, which occurred just after 8 p.m., sent the tangled vehicles careening across the roadway.

“They tangled and spun around,” he said. “When they came to rest, the damaged side of the pickup was facing west.”

The incident blocked traffic for at least a mile as the California Highway Patrol closed off four of the five lanes for a period they expected to last several hours, said CHP officer Karen Faciane.

Killed were two passengers in the car, both estimated to be in their 40s--a man in the front passenger seat, pronounced dead at the scene of “massive crushing injuries,” Humphrey said, and a woman in the rear of the car, who sustained massive head trauma.

Both survivors were taken to Northridge Hospital. None of the victims’ names were released.