UPDATE, AUG. 9, 1:07 P.M.: One more shot by the Weekly's Brandon Ferguson from last night's triple-fatal accident in Buena Park shows the wreckage:
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A single-vehicle crash on the 5 freeway at Auto Center Drive in Buena Park Monday night killed three Downey women, injured two others and knotted up traffic for hours.
The Weekly's Brandon Ferguson just happened to be driving by when he snapped the photos that accompany this post.
The deceased were identified as: Sara Flores, 40; Angela Cid-Del Prado, 49; and Elda Nada-Mayo, 24. The 41-year-old driver of the Ford Excursion the women were riding in and another 16-year-old passenger sustained major injuries that are being treated at UCI Medical Center in Orange.
The party was returning from a church service at Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove around 10:15 p.m. when the Excursion, which was traveling at high speeds, went out of control in the northbound 1-5 lanes near Beach Boulevard, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The vehicle slammed into a guard rail, rolled over several times and wound
up on its side just west of the Auto Center Drive on-ramp. Fire fully engulfed the vehicle, whose occupants had been ejected.
Three Buena Park police officers, who were the first to roll up on the scene, pulled the driver and 16-year-old safely away from the flames. The three women were pronounced dead at the scene.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.