2 Students Die in Crash Following Grad Party : Tragedy: Crowded pickup truck spins out of control, flips over on freeway. Third teen-ager is seriously injured. Victims went to Hueneme High School.

Two Oxnard teen-agers were killed and a third was seriously injured early Saturday as they returned from a graduation party in a crowded pickup truck that spun out of control on the Ventura Freeway and flipped over, pinning them beneath its wheels.

Rosalinda Santana, 17, who had just received her diploma from Hueneme High School and was looking forward to a two-week snorkeling trip to study marine biology, was pronounced dead at the scene after the accident, which occurred at 2:42 a.m. on the northbound Ventura Freeway near Rancho Conejo Boulevard in Thousand Oaks.

Her schoolmate, Jennifer Rodriguez, 17, a junior at Hueneme High who had recently moved from Fillmore, died at 8:15 a.m. at Los Robles Regional Medical-Center, according to Senior Deputy Coroner Craig Stevens.

A third Hueneme High student, junior Veronica Ochoa, 17, was in serious condition at Westlake Community Hospital on Saturday. Veronica, an enthusiastic athlete who wanted to be a police officer, suffered multiple injuries when she flew through the back window of the pickup truck and was crushed under a wheel, said family and friends.

Three of the seven other teen-agers who had packed into a 1991 Toyota pickup after a graduation party in the Hollywood area were treated for minor injuries at the Los Robles emergency room and released. The others either survived unscathed or refused treatment, police and hospital officials said.

Stevens said he had seen no evidence that alcohol consumption contributed to the accident, and several of the victims’ relatives said they were sure the teen-agers had not been drinking. Results of toxicology tests performed during the autopsies will not be available for three weeks, Stevens said.

The driver of the truck, a 17-year-old Hueneme student, apparently lost control and swerved across several lanes of the Ventura Freeway, according to the California Highway Patrol. The pickup then flipped over, ejecting six teen-agers, and came to rest on its wheels again--on top of Rosalinda, Jennifer and Veronica.

The girl who was driving when the accident occurred had taken over the wheel halfway home because the pickup truck’s owner, a male classmate, said he was too sleepy to concentrate, according to relatives of the injured.

“Teen-agers usually think they’re immortal and nothing will happen to them,” said Terry Taylor, principal of Hueneme High. “It’s just a shame. I feel for the families, who were looking toward the rest of these kids’ lives (after graduation).”

Rosalinda had received her diploma Friday afternoon in a jubilant hourlong ceremony.

“After graduation, we just keep our fingers crossed that the kids don’t get involved in these kind of traffic accidents,” said William Studt, superintendent of the Oxnard Union High School District. “It’s a tragic kind of thing.”

On Saturday, dozens of Rosalinda’s friends and relatives gathered to mourn at the family’s house in south Oxnard. The night before, they had celebrated Rosalinda’s graduation at a restaurant. Afterward, Rosalinda left with a group of acquaintances, despite her family’s urgings to stay home.

“She had all these plans, all these things she really wanted to do,” said her sister, Maria Santana. “She wanted to travel, she wanted to go to Italy, she wanted to go to Spain.”

Rosalinda planned to attend Ventura College in the fall, then transfer to a four-year university. She was considering a career in education or marine biology.

“She told me she wanted to work with kids,” said her brother, Francisco, 15.

Rosalinda was planning to leave Wednesday for a two-week snorkeling and marine biology field trip on the coast of Mexico. Relatives had given her money for the trip as a graduation present.

The youngest daughter in a family of eight children, Rosalinda had recently planted a garden of pink and purple flowers, basil plants and peach-colored roses outside her window. An entry in Rosalinda’s diary said the flowers were planted in hopes of “making her mother smile” again after her father’s death from a stroke six months ago, Maria said.

Relatives described Rosalinda as deeply religious and said she was firmly against using drugs and alcohol.

“She wasn’t like a partier,” Maria said. “She wasn’t like, ‘It’s Friday night and I’ve got to go out.’ ”

Daisy Tatum, a Hueneme administrator, said Rosalinda had been identified as an at-risk student her freshman year because of a large number of absences. But after attending 13 weeks of Saturday classes on topics such as self-esteem, Rosalinda appeared to turn herself around, joining the swim team and raising her grades.

“She just made up her mind she wanted to get her high school diploma,” Tatum said.

One of her proudest accomplishments during high school was receiving the Coach’s Award several weeks ago for her participation on the varsity swim team. “The first year she struggled, but she stayed on and made it,” Tatum said.

Jennifer’s father, Florencio Rodriguez of Fillmore, was too distraught to talk Saturday afternoon.

His fiancee, Robin Nevarez, described Jennifer as a typical teen-ager.

Nevarez said she was recovering from dental surgery when she met Jennifer for the first time.

“She went out of her way to help me clean the house,” she said. “This girl was a good kid.”

Nevarez said Jennifer’s mother, who lives in Oxnard, was staying with relatives outside the county on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the family of Veronica Ochoa paced the corridors of Westlake Medical Center on Saturday as they waited to visit the injured girl.

Choking back tears after visiting Veronica in the intensive care unit, Adriana Flores described her niece as “one of the friendliest people,” who plays on Hueneme’s softball team and teaches tai kwon do at a local karate school.

Veronica has long planned on a career in law enforcement and hopes to enter either the police academy or the National Guard, friends and family said. She suffered several broken bones and bruises in the crash, they said, but remains optimistic.

“She knows she’s pretty bad, but she knows she’s going to make it,” Flores said. “She’s got a lot of plans for the future.”

Veronica’s colleague at the tai kwon do studio, assistant instructor Henry Garcia, agreed with that assessment: “She’s a real motivated person, very hard-working,” he said. “She’s more than halfway to a black belt.”

Shocked at how quickly celebration could turn to tragedy, several Hueneme classmates said they were shaken by the deaths.

“Graduation is something you look at with all this anticipation for the future, for going on in life, and so it’s really sad and ironic,” said class valedictorian Virginia Justus, who had addressed the approximately 430 graduating seniors at the ceremony.

The last fatal post-graduation traffic accident involving Ventura County high school students took place in 1990, when an 18-year-old Fillmore senior was killed in a crash just hours after he graduated.

Simon is a staff writer and Fields is a correspondent for The Times. Times staff writer Leonard N. Fleming contributed to this report.