Faith Joined Friends Killed in Fiery Crash

The two couples were the closest of friends, all four Jehovah’s Witnesses who had come to the religion searching for meaning in roughened lives.

And Benjamin and Carmen Rea of Los Angeles couldn’t do enough to make their friends visiting from New York feel at home. After all, Jaime Rodriguez, 36, a respected member of the church, and his wife, Myriam Esperanza Rodriguez, 34, had crossed the country to deliver a talk last Sunday at the Reas’ Los Angeles temple. Before leaving, they asked one favor: dinner with their hosts in Tijuana, the famous border city of the country where they were born.

But the trip came to a fiery end Wednesday.

On the way home, Benjamin Rea, 44, slowed his Ford Aerostar van to a near halt for merging traffic caused by road construction where Interstate 5 and the San Diego Freeway meet. The 18-wheeler behind them never even slowed, according to California Highway Patrol investigators. It plowed into the Reas’ van, engulfing it in flames so fierce that rescuers could not reach the four trapped within.

“They were two beautiful couples, people who served God every day, people who went through a lot and would have done anything for each other,” said Benjamin Rea’s mother, Elvia de la Torre of Stanton.

“They just wanted to go to Tijuana, they just wanted to do something fun together. When they came back, that trailer just went right on top of them. I don’t know how to bear it. My son, he was so good.”

The couples were the only people who lost their lives in the accident. But many thousands of other lives were affected. The nine-car crash at 12:15 a.m. left three others injured, one critically. It strewed debris across the freeway, incinerated two vehicles and slowed traffic to a standstill for hours after the accident.

The 34-year-old driver of the tomato truck, Leopoldo Nunez Sanchez of La Paz, Mexico, was arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter. Nunez, who reportedly was discovered by police walking away from the scene of the accident, is being held at Orange County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail.

Grant Orthmeyer, 24, of Irvine, whose car was burnt in the crash, was listed in guarded condition Thursday in the critical care unit at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana.

The crash has sparked outrage among opponents of a provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement that, if implemented, would permit Mexican-licensed truck drivers access to U.S. roads. President Clinton has delayed the provisions over concerns about the safety and environmental compliance of trucks and drivers licensed in Mexico.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez introduced a resolution before the council Thursday calling on Clinton to leave in place restrictions on Mexican truck drivers. And in San Francisco, California Democratic Party Chairman Art Torres faxed a letter to Clinton urging the same.

“It’s very difficult not only as a Latino but as chair of the party to come to this conclusion,” Torres said. “But these things have to stop.”

At the Stanton home of de la Torre on Thursday, Jehovah’s Witnesses from their Los Angeles congregation and from an Anaheim congregation where the Reas had been members until moving two years ago gathered to pay respects.

The friends spoke reverently of the two couples; Benjamin Rea, a truck driver born in Mexico, and Carmen Rea, 45, an immigrant from Colombia who drove a school bus for disabled children, and the Rodriguezes, who lived with about 1,200 other Jehovah’s Witnesses at a church study center in upstate New York.

Like many Latinos who join evangelical churches, the two couples led hard lives on the edge. Benjamin Rea’s mother crossed the border in Mexicali in 1959, when he was 7 years old. The next year, encouraged by an aunt in Hollywood, the family joined the church.

The New York couple had met many of the people gathered in mourning Thursday for the first time the weekend before, when Jaime Rodriguez, a minister at a Latino congregation in Patterson, New York, spoke at the Kingdom Hall on Ditman Avenue in Los Angeles on the date Jehovah’s Witnesses mark the death of Jesus Christ.

“A lot of people were very shocked about this. We know they tried to do everything that God tells us to do, but we know as humans anything can happen,” Margarita Rivera, 23, of Los Angeles said.

“But we know that God promises us a paradise, so we have to hope that someday they will live again.”

Among Jehovah’s Witnesses in Los Angeles and Orange counties, Benjamin and Carmen Rea were known for their piety, spending their weekends walking door to door trying to convince members of the poor barrios where they lived to join the religious movement. They met when they both lived in Brooklyn, N.Y. After their marriage in 1993, the couple moved to California, according to friends, to help build the membership of the church on the West Coast.

Carmen Rea came to the church about a decade ago, as her first, unhappy marriage was falling apart in New York, according to her son, Fabio Londono, 21, who is also a Jehovah’s Witness. Later, struggling to raise Fabio and his sister and brother alone, she worked as a manicurist in a beauty salon by day and as a janitor at night, working from 7 a.m. to midnight with a one-hour break for dinner.

When she met Benjamin, Londono said, “It was like she met her partner for life. We’ve gone through a lot of things. Aside from the hard times she went through with my other dad, there was her struggle to try to raise us by herself. With Ben she was finally happy.”

Also contributing to this report was Times correspondent Debra Cano.