This frame grab taken from video provided by Roxana and Carlos Guzman shows a Limo on fire Saturday, May 4, 2013, on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in San Francisco. Five dead female bodies were found pressed up against the partition behind the driver, where they apparently tried to escape the smoke and fire that kept them from the rear exits of the extended passenger compartment. (AP Photo/Roxana and Carlos Guzman)
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — As smoke thickened and a fire grew in the back of a limousine, Nelia Arellano desperately tried to squeeze through a 3 foot by 1 ½-foot partition.
Stuck for a moment, Arellano made her way into the front seat. Three of her friends quickly followed. Five others didn’t make it. Their bodies were later found pressed against the partition.
Arellano said in an interview Monday with KGO-TV that she believes the driver, Oliver Brown, could have done more to help during the fire, which took place Saturday night on one of the busiest bridges on San Francisco Bay.
“When he stop the car, he get out from the car, he just get out from the car,” she said.
Arellano and other women had started the night celebrating the recent wedding of Neriza Fojas and were headed across the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge to a hotel in Foster City.
Brown — a San Jose man who worked for the limo company the past two months — has said in interviews that one of the passengers tapped on the partition behind him, saying something about smoke as music blared from the back. No smoking was allowed, he told them.
Then the taps turned to urgent knocks, and someone screamed “Pull over!”
Brown said he stopped on the bridge as soon as he could. Then he helped pull the women out through the partition, he said.
One of the women who made it through the partition ran to the back and yanked open a door, but Brown said that provided oxygen to the fire and the rear of the limo became engulfed in flames.
Brown said he believed it was an electrical fire.
“It could have been smoldering for days,” he told KGO on Monday, noting there was no explosive boom.
Authorities searched for answers Monday, hoping to learn what sparked the blaze and why five of the victims killed Saturday night couldn’t escape.
The position of the bodies at the partition suggested they were trying to get away from the fire, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said.
Fojas, 31, a registered nurse from Fresno was planning to travel to her native Philippines to hold another wedding ceremony with relatives. Her friends in the limousine were fellow nurses.
Fojas was among the five who died. Her mother, Sonya, broke into tears during an interview in the Philippines with local TV network GMA News.
“How painful, how painful what happened,” she said.
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