Eucalyptus Branch Breaks Off Schoolyard Tree, Killing Girl, 4

Every time her children would leave their Highland Park house, Esther Munguia would give them a blessing to protect them from drugs and gangs, earthquakes and traffic accidents.

“May God bless you and keep you, may he show you his face and have mercy on you,” she would say. “En nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santu ...”

She never feared that a tree limb might fall and kill one of her children.

Yet on Wednesday afternoon, in a freak accident that no one seems able to explain, it happened.

A tree limb about 12 inches in diameter and 30 feet long snapped just after Buchanan Street School in Los Angeles let out at 2:40 p.m. and crashed down upon Carmen Lucia Munguia. She was 4 years old, the youngest of five brothers and sisters. She died late Wednesday at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena.

Javier Sandoval, principal of Buchanan School, said inspectors examined the large, graceful old Eucalyptus tree Thursday and found no reason why its limb should have broken. “There was no disease,” he said. “There was no wind.”

Carmelita, as she was known to her family, was enrolled in English-language readiness classes at the school to prepare for kindergarten but was on vacation this month. Her older siblings Leopoldo, Leticia and Catalina had all attended Buchanan--and her parents had attended three proud graduations. Their youngest son, Luis, 7, is in second grade.

When Carmelita went with her mother to pick up Luis from school, some nine blocks from their home, as she always did, the coquettish young girl wanted to play.

“Here, Mommy, hold my purse,” she told her mother as soon as they walked inside the chain-link fence to the paved schoolyard filled with children.

Her mother took the small purse, Carmelita took a step or two toward some playmates and then, Esther Munguia said, the sky itself seemed to crack, breaking through the everyday after-school sounds of children going home.

For a split second, Munguia wondered if the sound was a hammer, or a ball hitting the wall. She looked down at her daughter, and saw her look up at her and then at the sky. Other children fled. And suddenly all Munguia could see was not her daughter’s face, but a long tree limb on the pavement right in front of her, its leaves still shaking from the force of the fall.

Frantically, she reached under the leaves, and pulled out Carmelita.

“Mi hija!” she cried out. “My daughter! My daughter!”

The tree had struck Carmelita on the head, knocking her to the ground. Munguia had nursed her children through injuries before, but never anything like this.

School staff members, seeing what had happened, ran over to the hysterical mother. They gave the unconscious girl mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and started her breathing. But she never regained consciousness and late that night, Carmelita died.

Esther and her husband, Isidro, 46, a paint factory worker, decided to donate the child’s organs. “We talked about it, but not for very long,” he said Thursday. “She loved other children. Our hope is other children might live . . . “

But for the fact that Luis had been naughty that day and had to stay after school--his mother lovingly calls him “mi diablito,” my little devil--he would have witnessed the accident.

Not until Thursday did the boy begin to understand the loss. And then, his mother said, he grew hysterical, crying that his closest playmate would not return. He kept saying, over and over again, “I don’t ever want to go back to school.”

A school psychologist was scheduled to meet with him and with any other children who needed help at the school Thursday.

More than two dozen family members gathered at the tiny, two-bedroom Munguia home on Thursday, remembering Carmelita, the flirtatious one with the long lashes who loved to dance and play teacher. One of the mourners was her grandmother, Catalina Ochoa, Esther Munguia’s mother. As the family struggled to make sense of the death of one of their youngest, the grandmother sobbed.

It was not just Carmelita she was thinking of, but of her own son, too, a son exactly the same age who died back in Pajacuaran, Michoacan, Mexico, 42 years ago. Ochoa had 12 children by the time her husband died in 1969. One by one, they began coming to Los Angeles. Now all of them--including 22 remaining grandchildren--are here. The funeral, expected to be held on Saturday, will be large.

Carmelita’s drawings were pinned to the turquoise lace curtains. Her hand-colored ghosts and goblins and pumpkins still adorned the door. Just before Halloween, Carmelita decided she no longer wanted to be a ballerina. “I want to be an angel,” she told her mother, “because angels have wings.”

Her mother took the white and lace satin dress she had recently worn as a flower girl in a wedding, and added wings and a halo of flowers.

Teachers and staff at the school raised more than $500 for a Carmen Munguia fund on Thursday. “The family is very poor,” Sandoval said. “They have no medical insurance.”

Asked for comment about why the tree limb fell, spokesmen for the Los Angeles Unified School District referred reporters to the district’s legal adviser.

“We’re deeply saddened by this unfortunate accident,” said attorney Ron Apperson.

Carmelita’s mother said she still does not understand why the limb fell on her daughter. “I can only think what happened was God’s will.”