Twenty-six members of a church group, including several teenagers, were injured after their bus caught fire and overturned on a California highway while they were returning from a youth retreat.
Twenty people were hospitalized and another six declined further treatment at the scene. Three of the hospitalized churchgoers suffered major injuries. There were 36 people on the bus in total, according to the San Bernardino County Fire Department.
Approximately 125 members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Santa Ana trekked to Camp Nawakwa in the San Bernardino Mountains to participate in a three-day retreat over the weekend.
They were returning to Orange County on several buses when one crashed at a winding curve on a two-lane highway near Running Springs just before 9 p.m., the Diocese of Orange said in a statement.
Father José Félix Troncoso, a pastor at the church, said that six of the parishioners were still hospitalized as of Monday afternoon and were being treated for fractured fingers and at least one head injury.
The other vans carrying the rest of the retreat attendees arrived at their final destination without an issue.
One witness told ABC 7 that the bus caught fire as the driver tried to brake around the sharp turn.
“They were braking and then right when he hit this turn right here, you could tell it was about to flip, so he jerked it into the wall and tried to stop it, but it didn’t obviously work out,” they told the outlet.
All 36 people on the bus were able to safely escape, with some, like 21-year-old community college student Cyntia Ramirez, scrambling through the top hatch of the bus with help from the youth leaders.
“It’s just a freak accident,” Ramirez said.
One of the youth leaders, 20-year-old Prisilla Mendoza, was in the middle of a well-earned rest after the three-day retreat when the bus crashed.
“I was asleep and I just woke up and I heard everybody screaming,” she said.
Mendoza said that she blacked out shortly after and couldn’t recall how she escaped.
The California Highway Patrol closed the road in both directions and is investigating the crash.
With Post wires
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