Thousands in Spain Mourn Crash Victims

The queen of Spain joined thousands of mourners on a soccer field Friday in a funeral Mass for victims killed when a livestock truck barreled into a bus carrying teenagers to summer camp, leaving 28 people dead.

Golf carts and hearses delivered the polished wood caskets of 20 teenagers and four adults to the Pajaritos municipal sports complex in this farming city.

With black-banded flags of Spain and the regions of Castile and Leon and Catalonia fluttering overhead, social workers led weeping parents to chairs in front of the coffins. Queen Sophia shook hands with some mourners, then sat with Spanish officials nearby.

The bus had been carrying boys and girls--mostly teenagers--from two religious schools outside Barcelona to a summer camp near the central town of Aranda de Duero when the collision occurred Thursday.

The truck, loaded with live pigs, strayed out of its lane into oncoming traffic and collided with the bus head-on, shearing its side and flipping it over into a deep ditch.

Twenty-seven people were killed on impact: 17 boys and three girls, as well as the two drivers, four school monitors and the mother of a teacher. A 13-year-old girl died Friday of severe brain injuries suffered in the crash, hospital officials said. Twelve others, including nine teens, were injured.

“The truck hit the side of the bus like a guillotine and killed everybody that was traveling on that side,” said Juan Jose Lucas, president of the regional government of Castile and Leon, where Soria is located, 125 miles northeast of Madrid.

“It’s a day of tremendous pain, especially when it deals with young people who were going on holidays,” he said.

Three of the dead school monitors were not among those memorialized Friday. Two were Polish citizens and will have a separate ceremony, Soria officials said. The third was reportedly Portuguese. Services for the girl who died Friday will be held later.

Most of the victims were to be buried in the Barcelona area.