Crash Victims’ Condition Improves

Hospital spokesmen say a San Pedro mother and two young children who were severely injured in a collision with a wrong-way drunk driver on the Artesia Freeway last week are improving but not yet out of danger.

Rebecca Carvellas, 21, was moved Wednesday from intensive care at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, where she had been in critical condition since last Thursday’s crash. She now is listed in stable but guarded condition.

Her 3-year-old son, Zachariah, is paralyzed below the neck by a spinal injury and has been placed in a halo traction device, a spokesman at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center said. The boy remains in critical condition.

His 2-year-old sister, Rachael, has been upgraded from critical to satisfactory condition at Kaiser Sunset Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles.

The driver of the van that struck their compact car head-on, Sung Wan Choi, 36, remains in critical condition at Long Beach Memorial, where one of his lungs had to be removed. The spokesman said Choi, who is breathing with the help of a respirator, has remained unconscious since the crash. He has been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving for traveling nearly eight miles down the wrong side of the freeway before striking the Carvellases’ car.