19-Year-Old’s Random Death Brings Home New York’s Sobering Statistics

The shot echoed as a No. 4 Bronx subway train clattered along the elevated track over Jerome Avenue. By the time it passed, Paula Soto had collapsed on the softball field below.

At first, her teammates thought she was kidding around. “Come on, Paula,” they joked. “Get up.”

Then, the brief silence, the knowing that something was very wrong.

The Lehman College Lancers had waited days for a break in the springtime drizzle. The season’s first game was just a week away. Paula, a short and sturdily built third baseman, was warming up in the outfield.

She had her dad’s dark hair and her mom’s blue eyes, much like her brothers, Jason, 18, and Nelson Jr., 17. “And she had a real spirit, a warm heart, a passion for people,” teammate Adeline Ortiz said.

She was 19 and leaning toward a teaching career. Some of her professors hoped she would one day lecture on the college level, but her after-school tutoring job made her think she might prefer working with children.

Detectives at the 52nd Precinct still are looking for the shooter. No one saw where the bullet came from or, initially, how much damage the small-caliber slug had done. Paula was down. That is all her teammates knew.

“I went over and held her in my lap until the ambulance came,” said Adeline, 23, who graduated last month. “The grass was all wet and cold. It had rained that morning. I just held her hand and talked with her.”

Random death is a staple of evening newscasts and tabloid headlines in this city. Turn the TV off, and the story is forgotten. Turn the page, and it is over. But not for the Sotos, or for anyone whose life was touched by the few, brief, slow-motion hours that have stretched into many nights and days without Paula.

It was 3:30 p.m. Lucy Soto was making chicken cutlets and rice for supper when the phone rang. “It was Roxanne, Paula’s coach,” Lucy Soto recalled. “All she said was that Paula had been hurt, but she was fine and I needed to come down to the school.”

Lucy Soto and Jason joked nervously in the car on the short trip from their red-brick apartment down to the college. She probably got hit by a ball, they said. Probably ruined all that expensive dental work. Surely, she was OK.

Once in the gym, Lucy Soto’s pulse quickened. She raced through the deserted locker room, got to the bottom of the stairs. “Then I see one of the girls and she says to me, real serious, ‘Are you Paula’s mother?’ That’s when I knew,” she said. “That’s when Jason and I ran out to the field.”

An ambulance and medics were already there. It seemed like a BB gun or pellet wound. Not much blood. Paula was alert, smiling, asking teammates not to scare her mom. “Tell her I’m fine,” she said. “I’m going to be fine.”

It was 4 p.m. when the ambulance wove slowly in and out along Bronx arteries already clogged with early evening commuters. They were not moving. Lucy Soto felt the clock ticking. Faster. Faster.

“I’m in the front, but I can hear her talking. I can hear her laughing,” said Lucy Soto, who had promised the medics to remain calm. “I’m shaking and everything. But I’m thinking she’s going to be fine. I can hear her. She’s talking. She’s laughing.”

At the emergency entrance of Bronx Municipal Hospital, Dr. Warren Wetzel and a crew of trauma specialists were waiting. They already had Paula’s name.

Paula’s youngest brother had to be located somewhere between his high school and the family’s apartment. Her father had to be reached at the elementary school where he works part time driving kids to and from home.

“As I hung up with Nelson, the woman who was working on Paula in the ambulance came over. And she said everything was going to be OK,” said Lucy Soto, 42. “And there was a nurse. She said everything was going to be fine.

“So I calmed down and they took me to her. She had an oxygen mask on, hooked up to all kinds of things. But she’s laughing, and she says, ‘Hi, Mom. Everything’s OK.’

“I took her earrings, her rings, her watch, her ankle bracelet. Then she tells the doctors, ‘Take care of my mom.’ And she turns to me and says, ‘Now Mom, don’t be upset.’

“Then I told her I loved her. And the nurse took me out.”

They wheeled Paula into the operating room at 4:35 p.m. Wetzel and his medical team did not fully scrub or prep for the operation. “We just immediately opened her up,” he said. “And the blood just bubbled out of her belly. We cracked her chest and cut off her aorta.”

Never had Wetzel seen one bullet do so much damage. Nearly every vital organ had been hit: heart, liver, kidney, stomach, pancreas. They stopped the blood in one artery; it spurted from another.

“She couldn’t have had a more devastating wound,” he said. The trauma team worked on her nearly four hours. She died on the operating table at 8:12 p.m. Her parents had to be told.

“It’s probably the most difficult thing you can do,” said Wetzel, 42, who left his native Milwaukee and moved to the Bronx 15 years ago to help the inner city heal. For a moment, the surgeon hated his job.

Wetzel had believed he could save this strong, young woman’s life.

“When they die in your hands, you tend to remember. I knew right away that she was in trouble,” he recalled. “But this girl was young, innocent, awake, breathing.”

More than 100 people gathered on the last Monday in March to hear the Rev. William Foley celebrate a Requiem Mass at St. John’s Roman Catholic Church. The goodby would continue over many, many weeks.

“You read about these things in the paper and you think it’s a tragedy,” said Chip Salvestrini, director of athletics at Lehman College. “But it goes in one ear, out the other. You don’t think about the lives that are touched.”

“When it happens in your life, that’s when you really see . . . how far one 19-year-old girl’s life can reach.”

Nelson Soto could not accept that his only daughter was dead.

The son of Puerto Rican immigrants, Nelson Soto grew up in the decaying South Bronx. He knew the streets and the risks. He had kept his three teen-agers close to home. He had warned them to be careful, and they were.

“She was always where she was supposed to be,” said Nelson Soto, 50, a short, stocky construction worker with dark, expressive eyes. “She was that kind of daughter. Was she mischievous? Oh yeah. But she gave us 19 years of pure joy.

“They put her to sleep and she went right to heaven.”

Wetzel could not linger on this young woman’s death. Bronx Municipal gets more than 100,000 emergencies a year, about 270 each day. To bleed for each lost life would be paralyzing.

His shift continued the night Paula died. But she stayed longer than usual with Wetzel, a bearish man with a a graying, brown beard.

“A young person is dead and that’s hard to talk about. She was innocent. There wasn’t a drug deal, or some other reason you might get shot,” Wetzel said. “We need to re-evaluate our whole society. We have this incredible crisis going on.”

Adeline Ortiz ended up playing third base last season. She was reluctant to replace Paula. “For Paula,” the girls chanted before each game. And they felt her there, right up to the moment they claimed their conference championship.

“We didn’t just lose any average person,” Adeline said. “When you come from a neighborhood where there’s drugs and alcohol and all kinds of temptation, it’s hard to walk a straight line. Paula did it. She had dreams.”

On March 19, the day she died, a letter arrived at the Bronx apartment Paula had shared with her parents and two younger brothers. She had won an academic scholarship for her junior year. She never knew.

“You’re always asking in my field, ‘Did I make the right choice? Do I want to be a teacher?’ ” said Salvestrini, the athletics director. “It’s kids like Paula that come along every so often and give you the impression that you did make the right choice.

“So you just wonder what was in store for her down the road,” he said. “You just want to know: What would this kid’s story have been?”

About 22,000 Americans were cut down by violence last year. More than 2,200 of them died in New York City alone, almost 200 a month, about six a day.

Detective Michael Palladino said Paula’s case, like so many random homicides, will remain open until it is solved. He is not optimistic.

“These cases can destroy you, but you can’t dwell on it,” Palladino said. “Since her death, which was such a catastrophe, in this precinct alone we’ve had 15 more. Here in homicide, supply exceeds demand.”