O.C. Friends Called Heroes in Tragedy

The three friends were planning to play blackjack at an Native American reservation Sunday night.

On the way, they alerted police to a horrific freeway tragedy, rushed to the aid of a blood-covered 5-year-old girl and chased--and cornered--a suspected drunken driver accused of killing eight people.

“We kept asking ourselves, ‘Did this really happen?’ ” said Lee Page, a 20-year-old night clerk at a Yorba Linda grocery store.

Authorities praised Page and his two friends, Stan Maloof, 20, also of Yorba Linda, and Shawn Veith, 19, of Downey, as heroes who helped make a quick arrest in the Moreno Valley Freeway crash that killed two babies, three older children and three adults.

“They became the eyes and ears of the Police Department,” Banning Police Cpl. Mike Nava said.

Page, Maloof and Veith said they never set out to do anything extraordinary. When their ordeal began at 11:45 p.m. Sunday, they said, they were simply trying to dodge a speeding pickup truck eastbound near Beaumont.

The trio said they watched in horror as the driver of the pickup sped up behind them in the freeway’s fast lane, and then suddenly swerved into the right lane, striking a Plymouth sedan. They said they watched as the Plymouth spun into a concrete median and exploded in a fireball.

“I heard the screaming, it was so loud,” said Veith, a waiter. “I couldn’t go near the car. I thought the woman [screaming] was in it, and I couldn’t see someone suffering like that.”

The three men pulled over. Page and Veith called police on a cellular phone, while Maloof ran to the burning car.

Maloof said he spotted two adults and a little girl alongside the car. The girl was lying on the pavement just a foot from the Plymouth and a man was standing beside her, Maloof said. Both were covered in blood. A woman was pacing beside the car and screaming in Spanish.

Maloof said he feared the car might explode further, so he helped the man carry the 5-year-old to safety.

Maloof said he circled the car and saw the legs of a man hanging out a window, with a child’s arm draped over them. Maloof said he tried to grab the man’s legs, but the heat was so intense he had to pull back.

“I was trying to reach into the car, and I couldn’t,” said Maloof, who is Page’s roommate and works at the same Yorba Linda Albertson’s. “It was all flames.”

His friends begged Maloof to back off.

“I was screaming at him to get away from the car,” Veith said. “I don’t know if he could hear us.”

Maloof said he remembers someone trying to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, and a middle-aged man next to him who also tried to pull the burning man from the car. Maloof said he and the stranger were so focused on rescuing the man, that they scarcely spoke.

When police and fire crews arrived, Maloof, Page and Veith got back in their car and drove on.

A few miles up the road, however, they saw the pickup that had been involved in the crash alongside the freeway and the driver getting out. The vehicle was smashed in the front, with a broken headlight, they said.

“I couldn’t believe he had survived that crash, and that he was running away,” said Page, whose father is a police officer. “It made me so angry. He had just killed eight people.”

The three friends said their cellular phone wouldn’t work this time, so they stopped to call police from a freeway call box.

The driver came toward them, looking frightened, Veith said.

“When he saw us, he turned and walked the other way,” Veith said.

They said the driver ran toward the median, lay down in some bushes on the median strip and then sprinted across the freeway.

“It was really sort of scatterbrained,” Veith said. “He seemed scared.” This time, Maloof was on the phone to police while Page and Veith chased the man down the freeway on foot.

They followed the driver down an off-ramp and then lost him briefly. Page and Veith said they spotted the man outside a Domino’s Pizza restaurant. He ran behind the restaurant as police officers arrived.

Page and Veith pointed the way, and police arrested Teodolo Gallardo Bermudes, 35, of Palm Springs.

Page and Veith watched police make the arrest and handcuff the driver on the ground. Then they walked back to their car, which they had left running on the freeway shoulder, and rejoined Maloof.

“There was an eerie silence in the car. We kept picturing these things we had seen. We were thrilled we had caught him, but we were also disgusted,” Veith said.

“We were also very happy we were still alive,” Page said. “You see how fast your life can end when you are least expecting it.

“Look at that family. They did nothing wrong, and they paid for it with their lives.”

After the arrest, the trio said, they drove on to a casino near Palm Springs where they stayed up all night--they said they couldn’t have slept if they had wanted to.

On Monday afternoon, they gathered at Page and Maloof’s Yorba Linda apartment, giving interviews to a parade of reporters.

They shrugged off the idea that they had done anything special.

“We didn’t do anything,” Maloof said.