Accident Victims

While Kim Lundell was studying religion in the United States, her teenage son in South Korea drowned. His death prompted her to start a church for young Koreans in Los Angeles County. Walnut Blessing Church of the Nazarene became just that, with high school and college students making up about 70% of the roughly 100 congregants. Many are recent immigrants whose parents are divorced and work long hours at low-wage jobs. "The church is their home," Lundell said.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $6.9 million to a Compton woman who suffered brain damage as a result of getting struck by a speeding police vehicle, attorneys said Tuesday. The jury delivered the unanimous verdict last week in the case of Sandra Griffin, 45, whose car was broadsided in 2006 on Imperial Highway in South L.A. by a police vehicle traveling 51 mph in a 35-mph zone without lights or sirens on.

At least eight people were presumed dead Tuesday after a septic truck collided with a sport utility vehicle carrying farmworkers and both vehicles plunged into an irrigation canal in a rural area of Central California near Modesto. Divers helped recover the truck and the body of its driver at 6 p.m. after working for three hours in choppy, fast-moving waters, authorities said. The cause of the crash remains under investigation, according to California Highway Patrol Officer Mayolo Banuelos.

Actor Shia LaBeouf, who starred as a motorcycle-riding greaser in the latest "Indiana Jones" film, was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving early Sunday in Hollywood after he and two other people were hurt in a crash. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said LaBeouf made a left turn and collided with an oncoming car about 2:30 a.m. at the intersection of La Brea and Fountain avenues. The actor's Ford F-150 pickup truck rolled over in the crash.

A recently hired plumber was sent into the bowels of the Orleans hotel and casino last year to unplug a sewer pipe in a large grease trap -- an assignment that would be his last. The hotel had no permit or training program to allow plumber Richard Luzier to enter a confined space where he might inhale poisonous sewer gas. He had no breathing apparatus or emergency rescue harness -- all routine precautions. Luzier fell 12 feet and landed face down in fatty sewage.

A small jet crashed Thursday while preparing to land at a regional airport in Minnesota, killing eight people, including casino and construction executives. Authorities initially thought 10 people may have been aboard the Raytheon Hawker 800, which went down about 9:30 a.m. about 60 miles south of the Twin Cities. But by late evening, Department of Public Safety spokesman Doug Neville said it had been confirmed that eight people were on board, including two pilots.

Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby" actor Morgan Freeman broke his arm and his elbow in a Mississippi car accident but "was in good spirits" in a Tennessee hospital Monday, his publicist said. "He is having a little bit of surgery this afternoon or tomorrow to help correct the damage," spokeswoman Donna Lee, the veteran actor's sister-in-law, said in a statement. "He says he'll be OK and is looking forward to a full recovery.

A Dutch survivor of an ice avalanche that killed nine climbers atop the world's second-tallest mountain over the weekend described a desperate scramble for self-preservation, with panicked mountaineers abandoning one another in the search for a way down the steep rock face. Some of the victims were swept away by a column of ice that snapped near the summit of K2 -- widely regarded as the world's most treacherous peak -- in northern Pakistan near the Chinese border.

Charles Peck had gone through some tough times in recent years, including a divorce, but things were looking up. Peck, 49, had fallen in love again, with longtime friend Andrea Katz of Westlake Village. In February, he asked Katz to be his wife. But there was a problem. Peck, the father of three grown children, lived in Salt Lake City, and Katz didn't want to get married until they were living in the same state. So, for six months, Peck looked for work in California.

Still in a daze from the crash, Donald Ashman walked over to the first body. Ashman knelt down and lifted a corner of a white blanket covering the body, placed his hand on the man's forehead and said the words he had said so many times before, almost always at a hospital: "May God Almighty have mercy upon thee, forgive thee thy sins and bring thee to everlasting life." The prayer took just a few seconds.