(05-07) 10:59 PDT DUBLIN, CALIF. -- If not for a bout of carsickness, Jenni Balon might still be alive.
It was Saturday night when she felt queasy sitting near the front of the limousine she and eight friends, all of them like her nurses, were taking to Foster City for a bridal party. Balon switched seats with a friend to sit farther back, her husband said - and then, as the limo was nearly over the San Mateo Bridge, it burst into flames.
With the doors apparently locked, the clearest escape route was the small window to the driver's compartment. Four of the nine women made it out.
Balon and four others didn't. They were all found later clustered near that window, evidently struggling to get through it.
Investigators don't know what caused the fire, but on Monday, that was the least of John Balon's concerns. With the loss of his 39-year-old wife, Balon now faces a future of raising their two young children alone.
"Every time I see my kids playing, I miss her so much," Balon said at the family's Dublin home, his 1-year-old son, Jayden, blowing kisses to him as he spoke. "Now that she's gone, my kids are always looking for her."
The 38-year-old physical therapist said one of the survivors, 36-year-old Nelia Arrellano of Oakland, told him details of the tragedy - including that the rear doors of the four-door stretch limo were locked when the women tried to escape. Arrellano told a local television station the driver didn't help as much as he should have. Investigators said Monday the car was carrying one too many passengers.
But nothing in the examination of what happened could change the most agonizing fact of all: Five women from among the group of nine nurses who had devoted their lives to helping the frail and vulnerable will never be coming home.
"We're all a very tight-knit group of folks, and we're doing everything we can to help," said Annaliese Impink, spokeswoman for Fruitvale Healthcare Center in Oakland, where nearly all the victims and survivors were current or former employees. Jenni Balon was among them.
"These are strong, loyal women who cared for others," Impink said.
Anna Alcantara, 46, of San Lorenzo, who worked at the Fruitvale Healthcare Center, was also killed, family members said. Officials have not identified the fifth victim.
As families and friends mourned the dead, questions emerged Monday both about the operator of the 1999 Lincoln Town Car limousine that was taking the women to a Foster City hotel and the actions of the man who was driving it, 46-year-old Orville Brown of San Jose.
Maskarich said investigators do not know whether carrying one extra person contributed to the cause of the fire or made it more difficult for the women to escape. He said the CHP did not know why the blaze had started, or why the women who died were unable to get out the rear doors.
The utilities commission may fine Limo Stop Inc., the San Jose company that owns the car, up to $7,500 a day if it determines the violation was willful, said a spokeswoman for the commission.
Limo Stop owner Kultar Singh declined to comment Monday.
Brown, who was not hurt, said in an interview that he had helped some of the surviving women to escape through the 3-foot-by-1 1/2-foot partition window and called 911. However, one of the survivors, Arrellano, said Brown had initially ignored problems with the limousine and then had done little to help the women.
Arrellano told KGO-TV that Brown "didn't want to listen" when she first asked him for help.
"I was sitting behind the driver, there in the compartment," said Arrellano, a nurse at Fruitvale Healthcare Center. "He didn't want to listen. I told him there is smoke and there is already fire, please stop the car, stop the car.
"When he stopped the car, he get out from the car," she said. "He just get out from the car.
"He didn't do anything."
Brown told The Chronicle that flames consumed the back of the car so quickly that he had no time to save the victims.
He also said that when one of the passengers knocked on the partition as the crisis began, he misunderstood what she was saying.
"They had the music up in the back, and I figured she was asking, 'Can I smoke?' " Brown said. "I said, 'The owner doesn't allow smoking in the car, and we only have four minutes to the destination.' "
CHP investigators said they wanted to talk to all the survivors. They include Mary Grace Guardiano, 42, a registered nurse at Crown Bay Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Alameda. She was released from Stanford Medical Center on Monday.
The destination Saturday night was the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Foster City, where Fojas' bridal shower was to be held. She recently married and had planned to return to her native Philippines next month for a ceremony before her family.
She and the other women in the limo were part of a close network of Filipino nurses, friends and co-workers said Monday - generous, upbeat and committed to helping those most in need.
Alcantara's brother-in-law, Resty Padojino, described her as a hardworking mother of two who was living out her lifelong dream to be a nurse.
"She was always good-natured, always helpful," he said on her doorstep in San Lorenzo. "That's why nursing was just meant to be for her."
He said her husband, Abner, and her children - a 14-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter - are devastated.
"We can only speculate about the condition she was in," he said. "That's the hardest thing for us right now - how she suffered. We can't understand."
John Balon said his 10-year-old daughter, Jillian, cries for her mother at night and is still doing paintings to give to her on Mother's Day. He said he told her that her mother is in heaven.
"I told her mom doesn't want us to worry a lot," Balon said. "She is happy there. She won't be happy if we worry."
Vivian Ho, Carolyn Jones, Kevin Fagan and Justin Berton are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org, email@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.org and email@example.com. Twitter: @vho, @Carolynajones, @KevinChron, @justinberton