Posted on 05/07/2013 7:53:02 AM PDT by Uncle Chip
A survivor of the San Francisco limo fire said on Monday that she believes the driver could have done more to help her friends escape the horrifying blaze.
Nelia Arellano, 36, was one of four women on the bachelorette party on Saturday night who survived the fire by squeezing through a 3 foot by one and a half-foot partition.
Five other party-goers didn't make it, their bodies later found pressed against the partition following the limo fire on one of the busiest bridges in San Francisco Bay.
Miss Arellano told KGO-TV that she believes the driver, Orville Brown, could have done more to help during the fire.
She said: 'When he stop the car, he get out from the car, he just get out from the car.'
Miss Arellano and other women had started the night celebrating the recent wedding of Neriza Fojas and were headed across the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge to a hotel in Foster City.
Mr Brown - a San Jose man who worked for the limo company the past two months - has said in interviews that one of the passengers tapped on the partition behind him, saying something about smoke as music blared from the back. No smoking was allowed, he told them.
Then the taps turned to urgent knocks, and someone screamed: 'Pull over!'
Brown said he stopped on the bridge as soon as he could. Then he helped pull the women out through the partition, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I was wondering the same? Are the doors locked up front and only the driver can unlock the rear doors? No one mentions that they got out through an open door, only through the partition.
One of the survivors says in the interview that he didn’t do anything to help — he just called 911 and walked away.
I thought bachelorette parties were before the wedding.
Freebasing?
Me, too. (Story seems strange on many accounts)
Sounds like the driver was also carrying something in his trunk that he shouldn’t have been...
No tip for Orville.
They were all Filipinas, most of them nurses, and the bride (who died) was preparing to go back to the Philippines to have another ceremony with her family in attendance.
Oh the pending law suits. Her statements create that precious question of fact which means the suit will go to the jury, which means the result is unpredictable,which means it is worth millions against the driver, the owner of the limo company, the manufacture of the Limo and each and everyone of its subparts, the dealer that sold the Limo and any of its subaparts, any leasing company involved, the bridge authority where the incident occurred and any dwarf who resided in El Centro California before, during and after the fire.
The bride was planning to go to the Philippines for a second ceremony.
She was already married; it was a bridal shower. The Mail isn’t real big on editing or consistency — I have believed for quite some time that many DM articles are pieced together from other articles they find on the internet, with little recognition that these articles vary from source to source and change over time.
If it turns out the limo had child locks or something on the doors so they couldn’t get out, it won’t look good.
The only passenger area doors are at the very back in these limos. Only the very back windowa open in the passenger area.
The fire was raging at the back. So you’d have had to go through the fire to get out the normal way.
To get out without dealing with the fire, you had to go through the partition up front, into the driver’s area, and out the front doors.
It's clear that Ingles isn't habla'd too well here, which almost certainly contributed to the death toll. When somebody first tapped on the window and said, "smoke, smoke!", he thought they wanted to smoke, not that there was smoke in the back.
This will be fixed in the usual way -- not by requiring that immigrants be more proficient in English, but by requiring that limos henceforth either hire drivers proficient in the language of the passengers or by requiring that the limo also carry a translator. And if you need five translators in one limo, well then that's what you need.
Why do some people assume the victims were doing something wrong? Freebasing, smoking while drinking Everclear, someone even suggested they were lighting farts! The women were pounding on the partition reporting SMOKE, which the driver misinterpreted as them asking if they could smoke. May these ladies rest in peace and the injured fully recover. What a tragedy.
So it wasn’t a bachelorette party...it was a ‘bridal shower’..
It still seems strange....I never heard of a bridal shower AFTER a wedding, either.
OR, those girls were smoking (or cooking) something they shouldn’t have been...remember, it was a party.
Well the least that this driver could have done was to open that back door from the outside — after all he had the key.
What the hell was he doing while they were frying right in front of him???
You’re right...but it is natural (especially for us) to speculate as to how a fire is started in a back of a car. If the story is correct, the driver is criminally negligent.
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