4 Killed in Accident on Freeway in Palmdale

Four people, two of them children, were killed Sunday afternoon when their car smashed into another vehicle in Palmdale and plunged off an embankment on the rain-slickened Antelope Valley Freeway.

Among the dead were a 7-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy, a man in his 30s and a woman in her mid-20s. Authorities believe that they were all members of the same family, but declined to identify them Sunday night because relatives had not been told of their deaths.

The victims were driving north on California 14 just south of the Palmdale Boulevard exit at 2:54 p.m., when a man headed in the opposite direction in a Pontiac Firebird lost control of his car. The car crossed the center divider and into the path of the victims’ Mazda Protege, the California Highway Patrol said.

The Protege slammed into the Firebird, then careened off the roadway and over a 10-foot embankment.

“That tells the story right there,” said CHP Sgt. Tom Lackey, gesturing at the crumpled Protege. Beside the girl’s body was a doll covered in mud. Next to that was a bright orange basketball.

“It’s really sad. That’s a whole family gone,” Lackey said.

The driver of the Firebird, identified as Chris L. Panaggio, 22, of Costa Mesa, suffered a concussion and was taken to Lancaster Community Hospital. He told investigators that he remembered little of the accident. He was apparently returning home from visiting his mother in Kern County.

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Investigators said bad driving conditions contributed to the accident. There were numerous minor accidents in the area caused by the rain, authorities said.

“It was real wet; there was lots of rain,” said CHP Sgt. Robert Hulbert.

Officers were still investigating whether speed played a role in Panaggio losing control of his car. There was no indication that either driver had been drinking, authorities said.

The CHP closed California 14 in both directions for nearly five hours while workers from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office extracted the bodies from the car.

The backup extended over a mile in each direction as rain continued to fall Sunday night.

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If the accident turns out to involve a family, it would be the second such tragedy in about a month in the Los Angeles area. Four members of the Lechuga family died as the result of a Nov. 28 crash in which the family vehicle rolled down a snowy cliff in the Angeles National Forest.