4 Die in Crash on Antelope Valley Freeway

Four people, two of them children, were killed when their car smashed into another vehicle and plunged off an embankment along the rain-slicked Antelope Valley Freeway Sunday afternoon.

The accident shut down the freeway for several hours, clogging post-holiday traffic along an important high desert artery.

Those killed were a 7-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, a man in his 30s and a woman in her mid-20s. Authorities believe they are all members of the same family but declined to identify them Sunday night because their relatives had not yet been told of their deaths.

The victims were driving north on the freeway just south of the Palmdale Boulevard exit shortly before 3 p.m. when a man headed in the opposite direction in a Pontiac Firebird lost control of his car. The car slid across the center divider and into the path of the victims’ Mazda Protege, the California Highway Patrol said.

The Protege slammed into the Firebird, then careened off the roadway and over a 10-foot embankment. Firewood being carried in the car was propelled into the occupants, worsening their injuries, authorities said.

“That tells the story right there,” said CHP Sgt. Tom Lackey, gesturing at the crumpled Protege as investigators wrapped the body of the girl in a coroner’s clear, plastic bag. Beside her was a doll covered in mud. Next to that was a bright-orange basketball.

“It’s really sad. That’s a whole family gone,” Lackey said.

The driver of the Firebird, identified as Chris L. Panaggio, 22, of Costa Mesa, suffered a concussion and was taken to Lancaster Community Hospital. He told investigators he remembered little of the accident. He was apparently returning home from visiting his mother in Weldon in Kern County.

Investigators said bad driving conditions contributed to the accident. There also were numerous minor accidents in the area that were caused by the rain, authorities said.

“It was real wet, there was lots of rain,” said CHP Sgt. Robert Hulbert.

Officers were still investigating whether speed played a role in causing Panaggio to lose control of his car. There was no indication either driver had been drinking, authorities said.

The CHP closed the highway in both directions for nearly five hours, while workers from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office extracted the bodies from the car.

The gridlock extended over a mile in each direction as rain continued to fall Sunday night. If the accident did involve a family, it would be the second time in about a month that an entire family has been killed in a traffic accident in the Los Angeles area. Four members of the Lechuga family died as the result of a Nov. 28 crash in which the family’s vehicle rolled down a snowy cliff in the Angeles National Forest.