O.C. parents grieve from hospital room
A lawyer representing the Ladera Ranch couple whose three young children died last week when a big rig rear-ended their minivan on Interstate 5 said Tuesday that the grieving parents were “holed up” in a hospital room relying on “faith, God and family” to get through the crisis and give meaning to their children’s lives.
“This is a very special family,” Jeoffrey L. Robinson said at a news conference in front of Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, where Lori Coble, 30, and her mother, Cynthia Maestri, 60, had been hospitalized since Friday.
With them most of the time, he said, was Chris Coble, the children’s father.
“This loss is like a gaping hole in their bodies and lives,” Robinson said. “They are struggling day to day; it’s all they can do to keep going forward.”
Robinson said the family had been buoyed by the outpouring of public support and wanted to assure everyone that they were exploring ways “to make sure that the children didn’t die in vain” by minimizing the chances of it happening again. Among options being considered, he said, are legal actions against the truck driver, the company for which he works, and Caltrans, the state agency that maintains the stretch of highway where the accident occurred.
“It doesn’t take an expert to realize that traffic backs up in that place,” said Robinson, whose Newport Beach firm specializes in catastrophic personal injury and product liability cases, often against Caltrans. “I don’t know what we will end up doing.”
The three children -- Kyle, 5, Emma, 4, and Katie, 2 -- died Friday after the big rig plowed into the back of the family’s minivan amid stop-and-go traffic on Interstate 5 just north of Oso Parkway in Mission Viejo.
Their mother, who was driving, and grandmother were injured and taken to Mission Hospital. Officials there Tuesday described their conditions as good.
The truck driver, who was not hurt, told police he was traveling 55 to 60 mph in the southbound slow lane when traffic suddenly halted and he couldn’t stop in time.
Memorial services for the children are scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at Presbyterian Church of the Master in Mission Viejo.
“Their goal,” Robinson said of the hospitalized family members, “is to make it to the services.”
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