Driver Found Guilty in Crash That Killed 12 : Court: Twenty people were crammed into his pickup truck when he fell asleep and it went off the road near Barstow. He could get a 13-year term for manslaughter.

The driver of an overloaded pickup truck that crashed last year near Barstow, killing 12 of the 20 people on board, was convicted Thursday of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and now faces a maximum 13-year prison term.

The March 9, 1994, crash was the worst ever in California involving a single, private vehicle.

The 1981 Toyota pickup drifted off Interstate 15 and plowed into a dirt culvert after the driver, Wenndover Ordonez, 24, fell asleep. The passengers, all illegal immigrants, were being driven by Ordonez from Nogales, Ariz., to Los Angeles, authorities said.

The three passengers in the two-seat cab of the vehicle and nine of the 16 passengers who were crammed beneath the truck bed’s camper shell were killed. Three of the passengers killed in the truck bed were crushed by other bodies and the six others were fatally injured when they were ejected from the vehicle, according to the San Bernardino County coroner’s office.

The California Highway Patrol later found that the camper shell was not securely attached to the truck, the truck’s tires were dangerously over-inflated, and the vehicle’s weight exceeded its design capacity by more than 1,200 pounds.

Motorists testified that the vehicle was speeding before the crash, but CHP investigators concluded that it was traveling only about 40 m.p.h. when it drifted off the southbound lanes of I-15. The crash would have been survivable if there had been fewer passengers and they had been wearing seat belts, prosecutor Steve Sinfield said.

Ordonez, who faces federal charges of smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States, was guilty of gross negligence because he knowingly was operating a vehicle that was dangerously overloaded, the Superior Court jury in Barstow found.

“This defendant did not care one iota about the people in that truck,” Sinfield told the jury in his closing statement. “He just cared about money.”

According to testimony from the crash survivors, the passengers--most of whom were from El Salvador--paid up to $2,500 each to be delivered to Los Angeles by way of Nogales, where Ordonez picked them up. He left Nogales the evening of March 8, made two stops and apparently fell asleep just west of Barstow about 5 the next morning.

Ordonez’s attorney, San Bernardino County Chief Public Defender George Thompson, argued that the vehicle’s condition did not contribute to the crash, and that his client fell asleep at the wheel and thus should not be held accountable for the deaths because he was unconscious at the time of the crash.

In his rebuttal statement, Sinfield responded, “Was he sleeping when he loaded 20 people into that truck?”

Ordonez was convicted of 12 felony counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, which carries a maximum 12-year prison term, and two misdemeanor counts for driving without a license, which carries another one-year maximum term.