3 Young O.C. Residents Die as Crash Shears Car : Accident: A fourth is critically hurt. Speeding driver says he was trying to flee nightclub where shots were fired.

Three young adults died and another was critically injured early Sunday when their car, traveling more than twice the legal speed limit, skidded out of control at an intersection and slammed into a traffic signal standard, shearing the vehicle in half.

The gray Mercedes driven by Hoang Kim Hoang, 22, of Midway City was going about 85 m.p.h. when it swerved to pass a white car stopped at a red light at Trask Avenue and Hoover Street, then smashed into the pole, police said.

Hoang, who survived with minor injuries, told police officers that he and his friends were trying to flee from a Stanton nightclub where gunshots were fired.

“He didn’t know if he was being chased,” said Sgt. Tom Broderson of the Westminster Police Department. Investigators were still trying to learn late Sunday whether there actually had been an incident at a nightclub.

The loud crash at 12:20 a.m. shook the neighborhood awake, drawing a score of onlookers from nearby homes. “There were body parts literally all over the street,” one witness said. Another said the impact was so great that the front and rear sections of the car were separated by 50 or 60 feet.

Michael Verrengia, a Garden Grove resident who identified himself as a Garden Grove reserve police officer, stopped at the scene minutes after the accident. He described seeing three bodies lying amid the rubble from the wreckage.

“I’ve been in law enforcement for 15 years [and] this is the worst accident I’ve ever seen,” Verrengia said.

It was the latest in a series of major automobile accidents this summer that have killed 13 Orange County residents and seriously injured more than a dozen others. Most of the wrecks have involved alcohol and high-speed driving.

In Sunday’s crash, Saythong Thomgprachanh, 20, of Worthington, Minn., and Stephanie Le, 20, of Highland, both seated in the back, were thrown from the car and killed instantly. Dung Bui, 21, of Irvine, seated in the front passenger seat, who was not ejected, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Another passenger in the back seat, Duyen Nguyen, 18, of Garden Grove, suffered serious head injuries and broken bones. The freshman at Orange Coast College was listed in critical condition Sunday at UCI Medical Center in Orange and was not expected to live.

Nguyen’s mother, Lynn Do, spent almost all of Sunday in the waiting room of intensive care unit, hoping to receive some good news of her daughter’s condition.

“There’s nothing else we can do but pray,” said Do. “She [is] a good daughter. She helped out in the house, and did her duty by going to school and work.”

A few of Nguyen’s cousins also waited anxiously at the hospital.

One of them, 17-year-old Kathy Do of Garden Grove, said she had seen her cousin at a Stanton nightclub at Hoover Street and Garden Grove Boulevard minutes before the crash.

Do said Nguyen and the other people who rode in the Mercedes seemed to be enjoying themselves at the nightclub. Her cousin and her friends were dancing the cha-cha and other dances, Do said.

“They don’t cause trouble, they’re really innocent people,” Do said of the people involved in the accident.

Another of the cousins, Trang Nguyen, said she and the others had gone to the nightclub because it was teens’ night, when alcohol is not served.

Trang Nguyen and Do both said they saw no signs of trouble at the nightclub.

Do said that Stephanie Le was the girlfriend of Dung Bui and that the two planned to be married within the next year.

At her Garden Grove home, Le’s mother broke down in tears as she talked about her daughter.

Vicky Trinh, Le’s mother, said Le and Bui, who had been living together for two years in a Westminster apartment, came to her house to pick up cooked food almost every day.

Trinh, a manicurist at a Fountain Valley beauty salon, said Le had recently graduated from cosmetology school, where she trained to be a manicurist.

“We hoped to work together someday,” Trinh said. “That was our plan. Right now I still think it’s not true . . . that she’ll come home and pick up her food. I don’t believe it.”

Parents said they didn’t know the driver, Hoang. He survived the accident with only a minor head injury because he was wearing a seat belt and was protected by an air bag, police said.

Hoang was treated and released from Huntington Beach Medical Center and was not taken into custody, police said. None of the passengers in the rear seat were wearing seat belts.

Police said that two unopened bottles of beer were found in the car but that alcohol was not a factor in the crash.

In the neighborhood where the accident occurred, residents said they were trying to recover from the violence of the crash. There have been collisions at that intersection before, some of them fatal, but none like Sunday’s, they said.

“It woke everybody up,” said Donna Akiona, 54. “There had to have been 20 people out there. . . . I heard screaming and I knew somebody was hurt. I called 911 and told them to get an ambulance.”

The area was so filled with debris that it was not cleaned up until after 5 a.m., Akiona said. “We didn’t get any sleep last night,” she said.

The accident ratcheted up still further the alarming toll in summer crashes involving young Orange County residents. The victims include:

* Three teen-agers killed and five others injured when their sports utility vehicle careened out of control on a desert road and rolled over several times July 29 near Victorville in San Bernardino County. Beer cans were found strewn among the wreckage and the 17-year-old driver was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol.

* Two Fountain Valley 16-year-olds who died 12 days later in the back of a red Mustang that was traveling more than 70 m.p.h. on a residential street when it slammed into a tree and a wall. The driver was trying to get a friend to traffic school on time.

* A 17-year-old passenger killed less than a week later when a car driven by an 18-year-old who authorities said was drunk hit a tree in Anaheim.

* A 17-year-old killed just 20 minutes after that in a Fountain Valley crash that police attributed to racing.

Times staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this report.