A Whirlwind for Rescuers and Hospitals

The first call for help Wednesday came at 1:47 p.m.

An 86-year-old man, driving faster than 50 mph, had run through 2 1/2 blocks of vendors and shoppers at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market. In the car’s wake, bodies and boxes had flown into the air with such force that witnesses later said they thought a bomb had exploded.

A minute after the first 911 call, the Santa Monica Fire Department’s public address system blared: “Multiple-casualty incident with the possibility of gunshots fired.”

Fire Chief Ettore Berardinelli recalled thinking: “This can’t be as bad as it sounds.” He climbed into his car and followed the lead fire engine five blocks to the farmers market.

Santa Monica police officers on a lunch break nearby arrived within 20 seconds of the first call and described the destruction of the market over a police radio.

Two other officers -- Jason Bendenelli, 27, and Frank Marnell, 33 -- drove their car a half block into the market, arriving by 1:50 p.m. They stopped when they saw the fallen victims.

Within seconds, a woman handed over her tiny son, screaming and crying, “My baby. My baby.” The woman’s mother, who had been pushing the baby in a stroller, was lying dead in the street.

The baby was limp and bleeding from the head. An off-duty nurse took the infant’s pulse and told the officers the child needed to get to a hospital within minutes.

One ambulance and a fire engine had just arrived, but the officers decided it would be faster to drive the child themselves.

“They just looked at each other and went,” said Santa Monica Police Chief James T. Butts Jr.

Berardinelli and the first of the firefighters, meanwhile, were beginning to set up a triage area for the wounded. Six more ambulances were called.

Berardinelli began to walk along the market.

He first saw the body of 3-year-old Cindy Palacios Valladares -- an image he said he will never be able to forget.

He walked on. Other bodies, some already covered by passersby, lay in the street. He began to count the injured, those people who would need help. He stopped counting at 26, and a third of the way through the market he turned back to tell rescue workers how bad it was.

“There was a lot of screaming, a lot of people asking for help,” he said. “There wasn’t one injured person who had been abandoned. Every person had someone from the crowd trying to comfort them and stop the bleeding.”

As he hurried back to the command center, the 31-year Fire Department veteran recalled thinking the destruction was much worse than he had imagined from the first call.

Emergency crews were too late for eight people.

Fire Capt. Lee McNett, who coordinated the rescue effort, alerted authorities that the accident was a large-scale disaster.

“He said, ‘Hey, you guys this is the real thing,’ ” said Dr. Wally Ghurabi, head of the emergency room at the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and medical director for the city’s police and fire departments.

By 1:55 p.m., Bendenelli and Marnell had gotten tiny Brandon Davidi to the Santa Monica-UCLA emergency room. The partners had pulled up to the one-story building’s back door, reserved for emergency personnel.

As Bendenelli, cradling Brandon in his arms, burst through the doors, supervising nurse Cindy Westhafer recalled, he yelled: “We have a trauma here.”

A call five minutes earlier had alerted the staff to a car accident, but the baby’s arrival was the first sign of how serious the farmers market crash was.

Ghurabi and others rushed to treat the baby. Brandon was bleeding from the ears. Nurses cut off his gray/green snap-on pajamas, broke open the pediatric trauma kit and went to work

The first ambulances began arriving about 2:15 p.m., Ghurabi said.

At St. John’s Health Center, four blocks away, ambulances had started pulling up 15 minutes earlier.

First in the door was the most seriously injured, a 50-year-old man bleeding profusely. Next to arrive was a woman with a fractured spine, then an 84-year-old man with serious cuts, followed by a woman with a fractured hand and deep lacerations, and a man with two broken legs.

Doctors worked on Kevin McCarthy, the 50-year-old man. His bleeding was so severe that they used a pressurized system to inject large volumes of O-negative blood into his veins, said Dr. Russ Kino, the emergency room director.

At the accident site, a mile away, paramedics and firefighters continued to identify and treat the most seriously injured. As they worked, people from the crowd tugged on the arms of paramedics, asking them to come help other people.

Six of the most badly hurt were sent to UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, the closest of five hospitals in Los Angeles County to treat the most severe trauma cases. The ambulances started arriving there about 3 p.m. A dozen patients, some with minor injuries, were admitted within 30 minutes.

First in the door was an infant girl with serious head injuries, said Dr. Larry Baraff, the associate director of emergency medicine at the hospital.

Then came a rush of the injured, including four patients with bones so badly fractured that they jutted through the skin; broken legs and ankles and arms; broken hips; a broken pelvis and neck.

“Everyone had at least one open wound where something was sticking out,” said Dr. Jeffrey Eckhardt, acting chairman of the hospital’s orthopedic department. “Everything that could be broken pretty well got whacked.”

Specialists from all over the hospital rushed in: pediatric intensive care doctors, cardiac physicians, neurosurgeons, the entire anesthesiology and radiology faculty. They were joined by nurses, residents and medical students.

By 3:45 p.m., Eckhardt had called in his entire staff of orthopedic surgeons. Each got a case.

By 4:15 p.m., the first patient was in the operating room.

Late in the afternoon, 7-month-old Brandon arrived by ambulance.

“It was like a tsunami came and hit the emergency room,” Eckhardt said, “and by 5:20 p.m. when the last patient hit, it was quiet. It was gone.”

By day’s end, emergency workers at the farmers market had treated 70 people, and transported 50 of them to eight hospitals.

At St. John’s, a team of three surgeons worked 5 1/2 hours to save McCarthy, but he was bleeding too much and from too many places.

Thursday afternoon, Brandon was pronounced dead.

“Wednesday night, I swear I didn’t sleep at all,” said Ghurabi, who watched a cardiac surgeon, a neurosurgeon and others try to save the baby’s life.

The two Santa Monica police officers, he said, had waited at the hospital, asking about the baby boy. “They just wanted to know how he was doing,” he said.

Chief Butts said that, when the officers learned Brandon had died, they asked to talk to the boy’s family.

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Times staff writers Megan Garvey and Jia-Rui Chong contributed to this report.