Crash Victims Praised for Church Work

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

Benjamin and Carmen Rea of Los Angeles couldn’t do enough to make their visiting friends 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 Sunday at the Reas’ Los Angeles temple. Before leaving, the Rodriguezes asked one favor: dinner with their hosts in Tijuana, a frontier city of the country where the Rodriguezes and Benjamin Rea were born.

But the cross-border trip came to a fiery end Wednesday.

On the way home, Benjamin Rea, 44, slowed his van to a near-halt for merging traffic caused by road construction where the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways split in Irvine.

The 18-wheeler behind them never slowed down, according to California Highway Patrol investigators. It plowed into the Reas’ van, engulfing the smaller vehicle 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 is being held at the Orange County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail.

Grant Orthmeyer, 24, of Irvine, whose car was burned 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 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 Los Angeles and Anaheim--where Rea and his wife had lived before moving north two years ago--gathered to pay respects.

The friends spoke reverently of the two couples; Rea, a truck driver born in Mexico, and his wife, 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.

The New York couple had met many of Thursday’s mourners the weekend before, when Jaime Rodriguez, a minister at a Latino congregation in Patterson, N.Y., spoke at the Kingdom Hall on Ditman Avenue in Los Angeles on the date that 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,” said Margarita Rivera, 23, of Los Angeles.

“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. 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.

When she met Benjamin Rea, 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.”

Times correspondent Debra Cano also contributed to this story.