Hermosillo, Mexico ? Sobbing relatives waited outside a morgue Saturday to claim the bodies from a day care fire that killed 38 children in northern Mexico despite desperate attempts to evacuate babies and toddlers through the building’s only working exit. A father crashed his pickup truck through the wall in an effort to rescue his child.

The family of 2-year-old Maria Magdalena Millan held a funeral for her, dropping white roses onto her tiny coffin and attaching a Dora the Explorer balloon to the cross marking her grave. One woman held a framed picture of her. “I love you and I don’t want to leave you here!” her mother screamed.

President Felipe Calderon arrived late Saturday with his health minister and interior secretary to visit victims in two hospitals. He wished the children a speedy recovery and promised families a full investigation to determine the cause of a tragedy he said was painful to all Mexicans, according to a statement from his office.

The death toll rose to 38 after three more children died Saturday, Sonora state health secretary Raymundo Lopez Vucovich told a news conference. Most of the victims had died of organ collapse caused by smoke inhalation, he said.

Delfina Ruelas, 60, said her grandchild German Leon died of his burns Saturday morning, three days after his fourth birthday. She and her husband saw television news reports that the ABC day care was on fire Friday and rushed over that evening.

“I thought he wasn’t that burned and that we would find him OK, but he was very burned,” said Ruelas, dissolving into tears outside the morgue in the northern city of Hermosillo, where she waited along with 30 other relatives. “They operated on him yesterday, and he held on, but today he couldn’t hold on.”

Firefighters carried injured children through the front door — the building’s only working exit — and through large holes that a civilian knocked into the walls before rescue crews arrived, according to a fire department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the fire.

Noe Velasquez, an employee at a nearby auto parts store who helped pull out five toddlers, said the father of one of the children rammed his pickup truck through a wall. Velasquez did not know whether the man’s child survived.

“I didn’t sleep last night. I’ve never gone through anything like that in all my life,” he said.