Two of the three men found dead in a mysterious car fire last week in Orange died from gunshot wounds before the fire, authorities said Wednesday.

The local victim was Edgar Berrelleza-Soto, 26, of Orange, police said Wednesday.

The other two men were Arizona residents who were reported missing last week – 19-year-old Antonio Medina of Glendale, Ariz., and Fernando Meza, 20, of Phoenix, according to Supervising Deputy Coroner Kelly Keyes.

“The cause of death for Berrelleza-Soto and Medina is being reported by the Orange County Coroner-Sheriff as fatalities due to a gunshot,” Lt. Fred Lopez of the Orange Police Department said Wednesday.

The body of Berrelleza-Soto had been identified last week, but his name was withheld pending family notification.

The cause of death for Meza is still under investigation by the coroner. Police are investigating all three deaths as homicides.

Lopez said Medina and Meza were reported missing last week by family members in Arizona.

Family members from Arizona said their missing loved ones were heading to California and were never heard from again.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Karen Medina hadn’t received official word that her boyfriend, Antonio Medina, was in fact one of the victims. However, the missing men’s names, ages and home cities are the same as those of the men identified by the coroner.

“His (credit) cards haven’t been used and his phone hasn’t, either,” she said.

Karen Medina said Antonio Medina and Meza were close friends.

“They were like one,” she said.

The men were traveling together Nov. 9, which was when they were last heard from, she said.

That was the same day, at around 2:20 p.m., witnesses spotted a car on fire in the driveway of a house in a quiet neighborhood in the 500 block of East Oakmont near Chapman University.

After some people tried to put out the fire with hoses and fire extinguishers, firefighters arrived and put out the blaze. What they found inside opened up a mysterious case.

Berrelleza-Soto was in the passenger’s seat of the car, and Medina and Meza were in the back seat, but no one was in the driver’s seat, police said.

A 56-year-old musician who lives in the house where the car was found burning got a firsthand look at the morbid scene. He said he saw the black SUV inching toward his son’s 2010 gray Chrysler parked on the street in front of his house.

“It was going like 1 mile per hour,” Mike, who would only give his first name, said last week.

The Yukon missed the Chrysler and slowly rolled to a stop in the driveway, so he tried to put out the blaze with a fire extinguisher.

At first, he and another bystander couldn’t see anything or anyone inside through the dark windows. But then they saw a red fluid flowing from the passenger’s side door.

“Oh, my God, it’s a body,” Mike recalled thinking when he finally got a peek inside. “It was pretty gruesome and right at my doorstep.”

Coroner’s officials had struggled to find out who these people were after the incident because their bodies were so badly burned.

Orange Police Department officials have no named suspects and are still trying to determine the motive for the homicides, Lopez said Wednesday.

Berrelleza-Soto was identified shortly after the incident with fingerprints, but Medina and Meza were harder to identify because of the conditions of their bodies, Keyes said. The coroner ultimately named them using dental records.

Anyone with information about the homicides is asked to call the Orange Police Department at 714-744-7444.

Contact the writer: 714-796-7865 or afausto@ocregister.com