By Claudia Salinas
The Monterey County Herald
HOLLISTER, Calif. — On the road to Sacramento to see his daughter’s first soccer game, Ricardo Morales was chatting with his wife about a sermon she recently heard about finding strength in Christ to accomplish the seemingly impossible.
According to the Seaside residents, their strength was tested down the road as they encountered a van on fire on Highway 156 near Hollister, the result of Saturday’s early-morning head-on collision that killed two people and sent six to several hospitals.
Morales, a 32-year-old night auditor for the Pebble Beach Co., said he didn’t even think about what he was going to do when they came upon the collision. He just made a U-turn, got out of his Dodge Caravan and headed for the van while his wife ran to the other wrecked vehicle, a pickup.
The Moraleses were the first on the scene, they said. At the pickup, Ricardo’s wife, Tina-Marie, found the driver dead. Seeing she couldn’t do anything for him, she began flagging down vehicles and asking them for fire extinguishers.
Ricardo began pulling the van’s passengers from the inferno with the help of another man, Tony Sanchez. Sanchez used the extinguishers to keep the blaze at bay.
“I was sure the van was going to explode,” Ricardo said. “Miraculously, the flames (temporarily subsided). At one point, when the van got engulfed in black smoke and one victim tried to come out, I ran to pull him from the smoke.”
The driver and the passenger sitting behind him were stuck, Ricardo said, but rather than trying to get them out, he and Sanchez attempted to reach the most accessible victims.
They helped pull four people from the wreckage, including the driver’s wife, who became upset because Ricardo was not helping her trapped husband. Eventually, the driver freed himself and Ricardo pulled him to safety.
The van’s seventh passenger, caught behind the driver’s seat, was not that lucky.
“We tried to rescue him as well, but he was stuck somewhere,” Ricardo said. “When I last looked in the van, it was wholly engulfed in flames.”
San Juan Bautista Fire Chief Chris Finstad was on the first engine and rescue team at scene, but they arrived too late to save the last occupant, Finstad said in an e-mail.
“I can’t say if Ricardo Morales was at scene or not. I do know that people had stopped and helped the people out of the van before any fire or police were at scene,” Finstad wrote. “If he was one of the persons that had stopped and help, he is truly one of the heroes.”
The seventh passenger was so severely burned that he has not been identified, said Sgt. Tom Keylon with the San Benito County Coroner’s Office. He was a King City farm laborer who had caught a ride to work with other harvesters, and none of the other victims apparently knew his name.
The other victim who died, the driver of the 1997 Chevrolet pickup that collided head-on with the van, was identified as 47-year-old Raymond Mattos, a Hollister resident who worked as a bus driver for Metro Santa Cruz.
After law enforcement and rescue teams arrived, Ricardo said, he continued to help the victims, translating for them from Spanish to English so they could describe their injuries and be identified. By the time the passengers had been flown to out-of-town hospitals and the Moraleses felt they were no longer needed, it was too late to make it to their daughter’s big day.
“She was a little disappointed, but she understood why we missed the soccer game,” Ricardo said.
He said he’s not much the hero some make him to be, but an instrument of God’s will.
An officer with the California Highway Patrol “told me that it was a great act of heroism, but to me it’s still hard to see it that way,” Ricardo said. “God placed me at the right place and the right time, and that’s the way I see it.”
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