3 Teens in O.C. Badly Injured

Three teenage boys who left Irvine’s Northwood High campus during school hours Monday suffered major injuries when their car missed a curve and plowed into a tree on Live Oak Canyon Road, the edge of O’Neill Regional Park, authorities said.

“We don’t know where they were headed,” Officer Katrina Lundgren, a spokeswoman for the California Highway Patrol, said of the 10:30 a.m. accident near Rancho Santa Margarita. “It looks like -- due to excessive speed -- they were not able to slow down and drive the road the way it’s supposed to be driven.”

The 17-year-old driver of the 1996 Honda Accord, Kiumars Vafai, as well as two passengers -- Sayyed Fakhari, also 17, and Michael Flynn, 16 -- were hospitalized in intensive care for serious but not life-threatening injuries.

Firefighters had to use the “jaws of life” to extract the three from the twisted black metal that once was their car. The impact left the emblem of the mangled Honda embedded in the tree’s bark. Fifty feet away, a roadside memorial of dried flowers and small white crosses marked the site of an earlier road tragedy.

The three boys apparently skipped a school assembly. The Irvine campus is not closed, so students can come and go during their free periods.

The crash comes as students and schools gear up for graduations and proms.

“It gets this way around graduation time,” Lundgren said. “You may be more likely to have drinking and driving and carefree teens out there thinking they they’re indestructible, looking forward to the freedom of summer.”

In this case, however, she stressed that no alcohol or drugs appeared to be involved and that all three teens were wearing seat belts.

“The seat belts and air bags probably saved their lives,” Lundgren said.

School officials expressed dismay at what the accident could portend.

“It’s horrible for something of this nature to happen at this time of year,” said Debbie Coven, a member of the Irvine Unified School District Board of Trustees. As summer approaches, she said, students start getting anxious about finishing the year, prompting teachers and administrators to offer dire warnings. “Nothing is worth your life,” Coven said. “We really want to encourage students to stay in their classes, finish school and then enjoy the summer.”

The CHP and other law enforcement agencies, Lundgren said, put on school assemblies at this time of year, aimed at encouraging safe driving habits. “We start doing it in the spring,” she said, “to start students thinking about what could happen.”

Northwood High’s assembly was on diversity and discrimination, students said. It is not uncommon -- especially with only 22 days of school left -- for students to leave campus during assemblies or free periods, but it was unclear why the three did.