No Time to Say Goodby : The crash near Temecula Valley High was over in seconds, but the pain lives on. The city has sued the INS in an attempt to ban Border Patrol chases through town. And an outpouring of love and support has overwhelmed the suffering families.

It was going to be Gloria Murillo’s first big story for El Remate, the budding Spanish-language shopper she had worked at for four months.

As she roamed the gory crash site outside Temecula Valley High School, Murillo managed to squelch fears for her own teen-agers, Little Gloria and Jose, who had left for class two hours earlier.

Murillo had scribbled down the details in her notebook: The Border Patrol had chased a stolen van, crammed with a dozen illegal immigrants, off a freeway that morning. As tardy students scurried onto campus, the van screamed through a red light at 80 m.p.h. and sheared in half an Acura carrying three people. Then the van skidded sideways across the intersection and plowed into two students on the sidewalk, tossing them into a fence and a tree.

While coroners “wrapped the bodies,” she dogged officers for names of the dead, hoping, she said, “to scoop the other reporters.”

Murillo pressed for more information. “I kept asking this officer, ‘Was it a boy and a girl?’ ” she recalls. “I was looking around for their papers and things.”

The policeman just kept measuring skid marks. Murillo persisted, but the officer curtly dismissed her until she admitted she now was asking as a parent.

“He looked at me, and he says, ‘Who are you looking for?’ ” she remembers. “And my (press) badge was turned over, and I said, ‘I’m Gloria Gomez Murillo.’

“He just came to me with open arms. And I kept saying, ‘No! . . . No! Which one is hurt?’ He put his arms around me. Then I wanted to know, were my babies in pieces?

“I started to scream at that point and fall, and I remember looking into the faces of all these cops, these firemen and men who had seen this kind of thing before. They were all crying with me.”

Now almost six weeks later, Temecula grieves for the victims of the horrid June 2 crash outside its high school, a crash that has galvanized the Riverside County town like little before. A parent, four students and a 22-year-old van passenger from rural Mexico died, once again raising cries and questions about the value of high-speed chases to secure a nation’s border.

At the school, teams of therapists counseled as many as 800 students--including eyewitnesses--in the three days after the tragedy. A handful of students were suicidal and some never returned to class before the school year ended. The city of 35,000 has sued the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service in an attempt to ban Border Patrol chases through town. And the outpouring of love and financial support by hundreds of mostly anonymous individuals has overwhelmed the suffering families.

“What people have done for us there, well, it’s amazing,” says Murillo. “They helped me bury my kids.”

That the victims came from such diverse backgrounds and represented every high school class compounded the tragedy, school psychologist Joe Stradley says, because virtually every corner of the community has been touched.

The Murillo kids--Little Gloria, 17, and Jose, 16--knew what it meant to be poor. As their single mother sometimes worked two jobs but refused to go on welfare, some days they went without lunch, some weeks without milk, so Little Gloria’s 2-year-old son, Anthony, could be fed. Nobody told them to; the teen-agers would eyeball the refrigerator then mix themselves Kool-Aid until mom’s payday.

John Davis, who drove the Acura, was the respected 46-year-old manager of First Interstate Bank’s branch in Hemet. Conservative and athletic, he loved golf and basketball, and spent long hours as the top fund-raiser for Temecula’s home for abused children. But longtime pals said family always came first. Proud and private, he only hinted at occasional conflicts with his teen-age son, they say, but devoted great energy to the relationship.

An only child, ever-grinning Todd Davis was a heavy metal fan, his bedroom papered with rock posters and scantily clad models. The high school senior had periodically worried his parents with bad report cards and “typical teen-age rebellious stuff,” his mother Linda says, but recent months had found him in church and back on track.

Sweet-spirited freshman Monisa Emilio, one of four children in a working-class family, was a candy-striper who donated her baby-sitting wages to support a starving Third World child. The Emilios had followed construction work to Northern California but took a 60% income cut to move back last fall because the kids missed Temecula so much.

The price was living in a cramped apartment, Stephanie Emilio said, but her daughter Monisa “was the only one who didn’t complain. She and Todd were alike, very happy.” Monisa’s older sister, Tina, was Todd’s girlfriend.

Little is known about the sixth victim, 22-year-old Eniceforo Vargas Gomez. He was a passenger in the runaway Chevy Suburban and had boarded with 11 others in San Ysidro that morning after evidently paying smugglers to deliver them to the United States.

While the Temecula five were killed instantly, he clung to life for five days before dying in a hospital far from home. Born and raised in “a very, very poor” remote central Mexico village called San Antonio Amialco, Vargas was a single laborer who had left his parents’ home to find work in the States, said Columbo Calvo of the Mexican Consulate in San Bernardino.

News of his death had to be delivered indirectly to relatives, because they have no telephone, Calvo said. Vargas’ body was shipped home to his parents but they could not afford to bury him, so the government did.

On June 23, the INS concluded that Border Patrol agents acted responsibly in pursuing the illegal immigrants and that agents had abandoned the chase nearly a mile from the high school. The agency placed blame with the van’s teen-age driver, a Mexican citizen facing six counts of murder, and any smugglers riding with him.

The stories of how the five Temecula residents arrived at that school intersection at 7:35 that morning are riddled with ironic twists and what-ifs.

Linda Davis, not her husband John, always drove their son Todd to school. Monisa was riding with John and Todd for the first time that morning. The other three Emilio kids were ready to pile into the Davis car when their own ride pulled up. And the Murillo kids chose to walk that morning instead of driving with their mother and were uncharacteristically late because they couldn’t find one of toddler Anthony’s shoes.

“I think, if I’d just kissed them goodby that morning, I would have made them a little later,” Linda Davis says softly, standing in her son’s disheveled bedroom, just as he left it that morning. “I mean, they were already late, right?”

John Davis had been bound for a morning breakfast meeting with banker pal Larry Jacobson and other board members of Rancho Damasitas to plan a golf benefit, so he offered to drop Todd on the way. He took Linda’s black Acura--she can’t even remember why now--and never returned.

When he failed to come home after that meeting, news broadcasts might have provided the devastating explanation. But a power outage in the Davis’ Meadowview neighborhood of half-acre custom spreads prevented that. Still not overly worried, Linda called friend and co-worker Laurie Mills to take her to Wells Fargo Bank, where Linda is branch service manager. They decided to retrace the route to school just in case the Acura had run out of gas.

At the scene, they were kept with a swelling crowd of frantic parents, some distance from the wreckage. The school’s switchboard had been flooded with calls and time stood still for those two hours as at least 100 parents waited and wondered: Have I lost my child?

Linda hung back while Laurie moved toward the crash site, but was unable to see the makes of the mangled vehicles.

“She kept asking me, ‘Is it John? Is it John?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell,’ ” Mills recalls. Panic seized both of them, so they told officers they would try calling John’s office from a nearby home. As Linda dialed the telephone, there was a knock at the door.

“There were five officers waiting for us in the garage, and their was pain and grief all over their faces, tears in their eyes,” Mills says. “The one officer’s voice was cracking when he said, ‘Your son has been involved in an accident and was killed instantly. And your husband has also been killed.’ ”

Mills remembers that both she and Linda Davis screamed. “And Linda was saying, ‘No! Not both! Not two!’ ”

Linda was taken home and has remained secluded there since.

“I still don’t think it’s fully hit me that they are both gone,” she says, haltingly. She wonders what that day will be like.

Davis, 43, doubts she can afford the home the family built when Todd was in second grade, much less maintain it. Her oldest son, Greg, 26, now teaches mentally disabled people in Northern California.

She met her husband in 1971 at a Monterey Wells Fargo Bank where they both worked. “I was so proud to go out with him, he was so cute,” she says, her face briefly seeming to smile at the memory. “He’s like Dick Clark--he never ages.”

Their son Todd, an athletic 6-foot-3, loved to camp and surf and play guitar--especially songs by Metallica and Led Zeppelin. He was undecided about his future but was toying with attending community college, possibly at Palomar, and perhaps becoming a firefighter.

Family friend Anna Gould’s kids grew up with Todd, who she baby sat for years. She loved that he was such a happy kid, always playing pranks. He and his best friend, Matt Mazeikas, would call and order a pizza. When the delivery person arrived, they claimed they were broke. “Then they’d pray,” Gould recalls, “and have the dollar bills rigged to fall off the roof, like their prayers had suddenly been answered for cash.”

Besides his playful sense of humor, his mother says with pride, Todd was “a well-liked kid.” After his death, classmates had his yearbook signed as a gift to her, and frequently his friends trek up to the house to clean the pool, deliver food or help Linda with other chores.

Todd’s prom pictures arrived one week after his death, and it brought back memories of that night. His nerves, his dad polishing his shoes for him. The same shop that rented him his prom attire donated tuxedos for his pallbearers, Linda remembers with a shiver.

“He was a good kid, a happy kid,” she says. “He really loved life, just like his dad.”

Though shattered with loss, Linda Davis is nevertheless angry about a law enforcement policy that she believes allowed the high-speed chase. She intends to do something that will prevent another such devastating loss and thinks back to the Temecula man who lost his wife and unborn baby in a 1990 crash with illegal immigrants fleeing Border Patrol agents.

“Maybe if we had done something--why didn’t we all have a fit when that lady was killed? Maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” Davis says. “I feel that I need to get involved, to know they didn’t die in vain, that their death meant something.”

With her long thick hair and dimples, Monisa Emilio, 14, was as pretty as she was adored. Of four much-loved teen-agers, she was unabashedly “her Mama’s biggest helper, the one who would walk me home from work to help carry groceries,” remembers her mother, Stephanie, whose eyes are still puffy from tears.

Beside her at the kitchen table is husband Mike, 36, who speaks with a slightly stuffy nose from crying. It’s 9 a.m. and a rough morning already, one week after the crash. After the interview, the family would pick out a headstone for Monisa’s grave.

“You’re not supposed to bury your children,” her father says tearfully. “It’s just not natural.”

It somehow helps her parents to let the world know what a jewel she was. Besides her sunny nature and volunteer work for the elderly at the hospital, Monisa also befriended a soldier.

After war broke out last year in the Persian Gulf, she began writing to a Marine and sewed him a big bear-like pillow so he’d have something to hug in the desert. She checked on his mother for him, and he called her twice from the front lines. They remained pen pals after the Marine returned to the states.

Eventually the drone of an MTV rock video is turned off and Monisa’s siblings--Tina, 17, Tony, 16, and Cari, who just turned 14--take turns at the kitchen table. Unsure what to say, it seems easier for them to talk about Todd Davis than their sister.

Tina went with him to the prom, and their formal picture has just arrived. She looks at it for the first time, studying it with a smile before her face clouds over. She is otherwise stoic.

“He was always smiling,” she says. “He would do things to make me laugh. Like put lipstick on.”

Cari giggles. “He painted his nails with fingernail polish once.” The kids look uncertain about what else to say.

“He liked to party,” says Tony, a star soccer player whose girlfriend is the Murillo kids’ cousin. “But so does everybody.”

A week later, Stephanie is on the phone, having the latest of many bad days. She is trying to return to work in the relocation department of a real estate company.

“I went yesterday for a couple hours . . . and today for a couple hours,” she says, with long pauses to collect herself. “I can only go for a bit at a time; everybody wants to hug you and help you, and I don’t know what to say. What do you say?”

On a sweltering Saturday, June 27, the family made a pilgrimage back to Monisa’s grave. Armed with a boom box and cassette tapes, they played her favorite music and honored what would have been her 15th birthday.

But in the sweaty desert town of Indio, it’s so hot you can’t touch the metal buttons of a pay phone until long past nightfall. Here in this chalk-dry valley, Gloria Murillo has barricaded herself from her Temecula ties, staying at a sister’s home until this week when she rented an apartment nearby. She spends long days with her only son, Ricky, 11, and her grandson, Anthony, who she will now raise.

Both cling to her constantly, nuzzling up to her neck and hugging her. The toddler cries for his teen-age mom, who he called “Ee-ha.” Ricky feels robbed of saying goodby to his big brother and sister, and has nightmares that he is left alone. He smiles shyly, but doodles pencil drawings of angels and grim reapers.

“What I worry about,” Gloria says of her children’s deaths, “is whether there was pain for them. Was there fear? All of a sudden, did they turn around and see it coming?”

Jose--called Tommy by friends and family--was 16 and a sophomore. He had played trumpet in the school band and was thrilled to have his illustrations featured on the front page of El Remate. He dreamed of becoming an architect.

Little Gloria, 17, had been derailed by motherhood at age 15, dropping out of high school to care for her baby. But her mother promised to help raise Anthony if her daughter returned to school. To avoid the stigma of a teen pregnancy, the family moved from Anaheim to the Temecula apartment of Gloria’s cousin, Elia Esparza, and Little Gloria went back to school.

“I said, ‘Mija, it’s your life, but if you want this baby I will do whatever it takes if you will graduate,” her mother remembers. “You stand proud and don’t let this mistake mess up your life.’ And that’s what she was doing.”

Only after they traveled 90 minutes by bus and van to the joint Murillo funeral in Indio did classmates learn that Little Gloria, a girlish braid in her hair as she lay in a casket beside her brother, had a child of her own.

The home movies that flicker through Gloria Murillo’s head now are filled with ordinary memories, magic only to a mom. Breast-feeding her babies in a moonlit nursery. Talent show night at school. Brownies, Boy Scouts--those halcyon days when she was an Army wife, troop leader and at-home mom.

It now seems as if they were born to struggle. Little Gloria, premature, weighed in at 2 1/2 pounds; less than a year later, newborn Jose nearly died of spinal meningitis. Third child Ricky was two years old when she left their father and material comforts for two jobs and the constant threat of welfare. But four months ago, it seemed her new life and job in Temecula held much promise.

And one day, she intends to return.

“I can’t go back yet,” Murillo says. “But I know I will go back to Temecula with the two kids I have left. That’s where we belong.”

When earthquakes rocked the desert on June 28, 350 people, mostly strangers, flocked to a Temecula Valley High School picnic to comfort Murillo and other victims’ kin, collecting $7,200 in donations. Almost $30,000 has been raised so far to help the Murillo, Davis and Emilio families.

And most every day, the families of the crash victims call each other.

No one else really can understand.