Victims of Fiery Car Crash Mourned : Tragedy: Family, friends grieve for loved ones killed in freeway accident Sunday night. Teen-ager is questioned, released.

Joined by 35 friends and relatives who had come from as far away as Mexico and North Carolina, Esperanza Davalos recited the rosary Tuesday in the house of her son David.

David, authorities believe, is dead. So is his sister, Roberta, and his wife, Norma. His 18-month-old daughter, Maritza, is also dead. As the rosary concluded, Davalos, clutching a tear-soaked tissue, fell to her knees in sobs.

Coroner’s officials still awaited dental records to identify the four victims of a fiery car crash Sunday night, but the Davalos family needed no official confirmation to begin their grieving.

Esperanza Davalos had last seen her 28-year-old son when he and his family had visited her in the Central California town of Madera. “It had been a while since he’d seen his mom and dad,” said Mario Brown, David’s best friend and the godfather of Maritza. David “just wanted to cruise up there and have a good time.”

But on the return to their home in Gardena, the four Davalos family members were killed, burned beyond recognition Sunday night after their Honda Accord struck a median, overturned and exploded on the San Diego Freeway in North Hills.

David had swerved to avoid a skidding Toyota driven by a Glassell Park teen-ager who had, police say, been playing a game of “cat-and-mouse” with another car at 90 m.p.h.

Police say the youth’s car crashed into the center divider triggering the accident. He was questioned and released Sunday, but officials said he may still be charged pending the outcome of the investigation. The driver of the car he was allegedly racing sped off after the accident.

As the families mourned Tuesday, the CHP had 10 officers investigating the crash, and Officer Dwight McDonald said they had identified the driver of the second car and were searching for him.

“We’re 99 and 44-one-hundredths percent sure we know who he is,” McDonald said.

The site of Tuesday’s sad gathering was a well-kept two-bedroom house on South Berendo Street, also home to Gerardo Villasenor, his wife and their two children. The close-quarters living arrangement was an effort to stretch the dollars David made as a delivery man for a medical clinic and Norma brought home from her maintenance job at American Honda in Torrance.

When a Gardena police officer arrived at the home at 3 a.m. Monday and gave Villasenor a telephone number to call, he phoned David’s friend Brown instead.

“I told Mario to call them because he speaks English better than I do,” said Villasenor. “When he called me back to tell me what had happened, I didn’t believe it. But he said ‘Yes, it happened. It’s serious.’ ”

Villasenor said David was an ever-happy, carefree guy who loved to play baseball. Norma, 26, was always nice to everyone, said her sister Isabel Navarro, but “especially to her mother.”

Roberta Davalos, 20, lived nearby in Inglewood with a sister but frequently stopped by her brother’s house. She was especially close to Ismael Villasenor, 16, who described his friend as a fun-loving young woman who went dancing every weekend and used her infectious smile to make everyone around her happy.

“Now I want to succeed in my life,” the young Villasenor said, his chin trembling. “Not only for me, but for them. I’m going to succeed for them, too.”

Across town the Davalos tragedy came up in an unlikely venue--during a news conference called by Mexico’s Los Angeles Consul General Jose Angel Pescador, who said Los Angeles law enforcement officers routinely devalue the rights of Latinos.

At one point Pescador turned to the Davalos case, complaining that the Glassell Park youth had been questioned but not arrested and that the other driver remained at large. “I know the investigation is continuing,” Pescador said. However, “none of them (the racers) have been detained, but the four Mexicans are dead.”

At the Gardena house, an emotionally tattered Brown said “the bastards who’ve done this” should be punished.

But the tone of the gathering was one of deep grief, not fury. Mostly, the mourners simply covered their faces and cried. The women shed their tears in the house. The men grieved quietly in the garage, and a dozen children played in the yard, oblivious to the pain around them.

Times staff writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.