Three Perris High seniors killed

Three Riverside County high school students on a senior trip to San Diego were killed, and a fourth was critically injured, Wednesday when their car went off southbound Interstate 15 in Escondido, struck a tree and flipped over.

The students, all teenage boys from Perris High School heading to an official pre-graduation outing to Mission Beach, are believed to have been racing with another car, a black Honda or Acura, when the accident occurred shortly before 2 p.m., authorities said.

Late Wednesday, the San Diego County medical examiner’s office identified the three dead students as Pablo Hernan Ruiz, 18; Javier Aguayo, 17; and Anthony O’Neil, 17, all of Perris. Officials at Perris High said earlier in the day that all three were seniors at the school.

Wednesday’s news shocked students, parents, teachers and administrators, who flocked to the campus in a scene eerily similar to one just two years ago, when another traffic accident killed four teens, including three seniors at the school.

Tom Kerns, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, said the black car fled and officers were investigating the case as a hit-and-run, even though the two vehicles apparently did not hit each other. He said officers have not determined whether the occupants of the other car also were from Perris High School.

The accident occurred near the center of Escondido, just north of State Route 78 in a hilly area near some commercial development in north San Diego County.

Kerns said the three killed suffered “traumatic collision injuries.”

Two of the occupants of the car, described as a white Honda, died inside the vehicle. Ruiz and another occupant, Jose Espinosa, 18, of Perris, who survived, were ejected. Officials did not indicate who was the driver.

Espinosa whose injuries were described as life-threatening, was transported to Palomar Medical Center.

Kerns said about half a dozen beer cans, including at least three that were opened, flew out of the car during the crash. Witnesses told officers that the teens were waving beer cans out the window as they passed a Perris High School bus.

The trip was to be one of the high points of senior week, before the last day of class Friday and graduation Saturday at the Lake Elsinore Diamond, a minor-league baseball park.

“Obviously we are in a state of shock and disbelief over this horrific accident,” said Jonathan L. Greenberg, superintendent of the eight-school Perris Union High School District.

Chris Cooper, an assistant principal at the high school, said the situation at the campus was “like deja vu,” referring to the 2005 accident near the school that killed four teens.

Referring to the current senior class, he said, “These students were all sophomores at the time and remember the incident quite well.”

He said school officials sent out an e-mail to parents about the accident, but not about the deaths because they wanted to be sure of the details before saying anything more.

Meanwhile, grief counselors were brought to the campus to provide support to students and faculty.

A crowd, including teachers carrying boxes of tissues, gathered at Perris High in the late afternoon, awaiting the return of two buses that had taken about 80 students to Mission Beach.

The crash victims had passed up the bus trip to ride down to Mission Beach by themselves.

When the buses returned about 5:15 p.m., the seniors emptied out, most appearing very somber and many looking downward and lugging beach gear.

School officials in Perris, which is about a dozen miles south of the city of Riverside, were putting together arrangements for a memorial at the campus at 6 p.m. Friday.

A senior grad night program at Disneyland still was on for tonight for the 536 seniors in the graduating class, but administrators were reconsidering those plans.

Principal Penny Graham said it was important for the Saturday graduation to go on as planned “to continue in honor of those students. This is what they would have wanted us to do. This is our way of honoring them.

“It’s going to be a long grieving process,” she said.

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stuart.silverstein@latimes.com

jonathan.abrams@latimes.com

Times staff writers J. Michael Kennedy and Richard Marosi contributed to this report.