School Grieves Series of Tragedies : El Toro High students have been shaken by a third recent death. Two classmates lie in comas.

The students had just come back from the funeral. They stood huddled in the parking lot, shaking their heads, trying to put together memories and explanations all at the same time.

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“I’m really freaked out,” said Caroline Lewis, 16, a sophomore at El Toro High School, which on Thursday mourned the loss of Joseph A. Leon, 17, who was killed in a car wreck Sunday night. “I’ve been here only four months, but the school seems jinxed.”

Since last spring, El Toro has suffered the deaths of two students and one recent graduate. Two others remain in comas from injuries suffered in auto accidents. Todd Oliviera, 18, who was driving the car in which Leon was a passenger, remains hospitalized.

Nowadays, when people hear of students dying at a high school, they think of guns or gangs, but “we have been blessed,” said Principal Jack R. Clement. “We’ve been immune from both.”

But at the 22-year-old high school nestled in the middle-class subdivisions of Lake Forest, just south of the El Toro Y, the 2,170 students are coping with a different problem.

“This isn’t supposed to happen to kids in high school, much less to friends of ours,” said Teresa Wilson, 15, a freshman. “We’re supposed to be immune from death. We’re supposed to be invincible.”

The tragedies began last spring, toward the end of the 1993-94 academic year. The events:

* In May, 1994, senior Jeanette Lisa Gray, 18, one of the most popular students in the school, a member of its Associated Student Body and a photographer for the yearbook and newspaper, died after collapsing at home while talking on the phone, school officials said.

The cause of death was listed as cardiopulmonary failure, brought on by acute bronchospasm, according to a spokesman for the Orange County coroner’s office, who said: “Basically, her heart and lungs shut down. She suffered a spasm.”

* In August, 1994, Tomas Mejia, 16, and three teammates from the school’s cross-country team were driving to a nearby Del Taco after a morning workout when their Honda Accord collided with a 1970 Chevrolet Impala, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

Mejia remains in a coma, although school officials say he recently was taken home. The other runners suffered minor injuries.

* In September, 1994, Elena Gomez, a new student at the school, was critically injured when hit by a car while crossing a street near the campus. She, too, remains in a coma.

* In April, students were stunned to learn of the death of Jeffrey Daniel Stenstrom, 19, a former star on the school football team. Less than a year after graduating from El Toro, Stenstrom, then a freshman at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., incurred meningococcal meningitis, a virulent and often fatal bacterial disease.

He died one day after his brother, Steve Stenstrom, a former El Toro quarterback who went on to Stanford University, was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League.

* And then, over the weekend, the school was devastated by the news of yet another death.

The accident happened about 10:20 p.m. Sunday, when a 1992 Ford Taurus driven by Oliviera veered into the median strip on Portola Parkway and struck a tree near the intersection of Glen Ranch Road, investigators for the California Highway Patrol said.

Oliviera, who was not cited in the crash, was taken to Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills, where he remained on Thursday. Hospital officials refused to disclose his condition or the severity of his injuries.

A CHP spokeswoman Thursday quoted the accident report as saying, “For unknown reasons, [Oliviera] possibly fell asleep.”

Leon died of a fractured spine and laceration of the brain stem after a “blunt force trauma to the head,” according to the coroner.

Students held an on-campus memorial service for Leon on Wednesday night before convening at his funeral Thursday.

“It’s incredibly sad here,” Tina Saghafi, a 15-year-old sophomore, said after returning from the burial. “We’re all saying to ourselves, ‘My God, these people are dead, and we know them. They’re one of us.’ It’s been so sad--and eerie--that I’m having trouble with it. In a big way, I’m having trouble with it.”

Teresa Wilson said an undercurrent of tension is rippling through the school, where tears are often punctuated with nervous laughter, mixed with sighs and hugs.

Because some of the deaths and injuries involved auto accidents, students are trying to be more vigilant and, she said, more protective of one another. There’s talk of the need to wear seat belts and to be forever clear of mind when behind the wheel of an automobile.

“But as for the feeling, the way we’re all coping,” she said, “I’d have to say that it’s total hell. We just can’t believe this happened. In class, we sit around depressed. We’re close to crying, it seems, every second of the day.”

Paul LaBlanc, the school’s dean of students, said the mood on campus all week has been one of fear and confusion, a quiet grief mixed with anxiety and uncertainty about the future.

“Jeanette’s death last spring was so unusual,” he said. “She just collapsed. . . . She was liked by so many people that it seemed unthinkable. And then students have been stunned by this recent one. The mood on Monday was very dark.

“Kids at this age really do feel immortal,” LaBlanc said. “And a lot of their coping is trying to figure out exactly what happened and why. I’ve said so many times this week, ‘You never want things like this to happen, but they do.’ A lot of the kids just don’t understand it.”