Coroner Again Brings Painful News to Family : Oxnard: The Ventura County official tells parents of their son’s fatal car crash. He is fourth male in family to die.

Dale Zentzis was the last man Molly Smedley wanted to see Friday morning.

Zentzis, a Ventura County deputy coroner, had appeared on her doorstep in Oxnard four years ago to tell her that one of her sons was dead, the victim of a stabbing.

About 7:15 a.m. Friday, Zentzis returned to her house to tell her that another son, Dante Smedley, had been killed in a single-car accident three hours earlier near Mugu Rock.

“When he came up, I knew something was wrong,” said Smedley, 64.

Dante Smedley, 41, was her third son to die violently, the other having been killed in a 1992 car accident near Las Vegas, she said.

She said a fourth son died as an infant.

“It’s not so hard to see a dead person,” Zentzis said after leaving Smedley’s house Friday. “What’s hard is going to a live person, a family member, to tell them one of their loved ones has died.”

Albert Smedley, 66, said he tried to console his wife after their son’s death. “No one can know what it’s like. . . . It’s been pretty tragic for us. But we’ve got to accept it, that it’s God’s will.”

He said Dante, a diabetic who lived with his parents and worked part time for their security company, often could not sleep and would go for drives during pre-dawn hours.

That is what he did Friday, the father said.

Zentzis, citing a California Highway Patrol report, said Dante Smedley was killed when his 1988 Plymouth Reliant drifted out of the southbound lanes of Pacific Coast Highway near Mugu Rock and plummeted to the rocks about 70 feet below. There his car burst into flames. Smedley died instantly, about 4:20 a.m., Zentzis said.

It was not known why the car swerved off the road, he said.

Smedley, who was divorced and the father of a 12-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, is survived by two sisters in Maryland and one in Texas, who was planning to get married today, Molly Smedley said.

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She said the sisters were making arrangements to fly home to Oxnard on Monday.

Paul Smedley, 37, the first son to be killed, was stabbed near an El Rio bar on New Year’s Eve in 1990, Molly Smedley said.

He died while trying to reach his parents’ home, in a field where Zentzis ended up examining the body.

Albert Smedley said the killer has never been found.

Another son, 38-year-old Warren Smedley, was killed in a head-on car accident May 2, 1992, near Las Vegas, the father said.