Donations will pay for boy’s funeral costs. : Help for a Bereaved Family

Enough donations have been received by the bereaved family of Omar Jimenez, an 8-year-old Santa Ana boy who died tragically trying to enter his home through a window, to pay for the $3,000 in funeral expenses.

“We want to thank the people who contributed. We want to tell them we love them,” Omar’s mother, Maria Elena Jimenez, said Tuesday.

Omar died last Wednesday in a freak accident when he was crushed by a falling window at the couple’s Santa Ana home. A latchkey child who attended year-round school, he came home from school but forgot his key. He was trying to crawl through the window when it fell on him, authorities said.

More than $1,000 in cash was contributed from Jimenez’s friends and co-workers at TDK Electronics in Irvine after she told them they did not have the money to pay for her son’s burial costs. The rest of the contributions came from other people, including Times readers, who pitched in to help pay for funeral and burial costs.

“ Que grande personas , (what great people) que grande ,” declared a relieved Roberto Escalante, who has fathered Jimenez’s two other children. “With this amount, we now have enough to pay the mortuary.”

Donations, some with kind sentiments written on them, accompanied checks of $20, $30 and one for $200, written to Escalante on behalf of Omar.

Many contributors were emotionally struck by the tragedy that befell the couple.

One Irvine family wrote that after reading about the tragedy, the father asked each family member, “How would you like to help another human being?”

The letter then said: “Enclosed please find $40 from Dianne and myself, $10 each from our working teen-age daughters, Wendy and Heidi, and $2 from our youngest child, Tamme.” It was signed Ron Eroh.

Jimenez, whose son was buried Saturday in Orange County, said the act of kindness from strangers had been overwhelming.

“Please, please tell whoever helped us, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said in Spanish.

The memory of the boy’s death has prompted the couple to look for a new home. They have two other children, Mayra, 3, and Hector, 3 months.

Roy Brown, owner of Brown Colonial Mortuary in Santa Ana, had offered the family two alternatives. They could have the boy buried in the United States for about $3,000 or have him transported to Mexico, where Jimenez’s family lives, for half that cost.

“After the story appeared in the newspaper, we ended up having to turn away people. The response was really amazing,” Brown said.

Meanwhile, the family and investigators continue to piece together how the accident occurred.

Escalante said he and Jimenez have examined the window repeatedly. It is an older, heavy double-hung window about 29 inches wide. Usually, it would be stuck most of the time, so family members would prop it open with a wooden stick.

“It took a man’s strength to open it. Maria couldn’t do it by herself,” Escalante said. “It was a heavy window. We think Omar jumped up about 18 inches and somehow managed to open it but couldn’t keep it open, and it slammed down on him.”

A spokeswoman from the coroner’s office agreed with Escalante’s scenario and added that as the boy climbed up and in, his body movement could have caused the window to come down.

“We tried the window several times, and it was tough to get open. You really had to push to get it open. It would stick once it was open, but with a little jiggle, it would come slamming down,” said Cherry Van Stee, a senior deputy coroner.

With a window ledge 47 inches from the ground, and since the boy stood 53 inches, “he would have had to have jumped up there,” she said.

The coroner’s office will conduct more tests before the death certificate is signed with the exact cause, she said. Based on a preliminary autopsy, the boy died of asphyxiation due to compression of the chest, she said.