Living for Each Other : After Devastating Fire, Rosie Garcia and Her Dad Try to Build a New Life Together

Like a figure and its shadow, they are inseparable.

Whatever they do--pay bills, buy groceries or check on their house in La Puente--they do it together.

If Rosie Garcia, 14, listens to the radio, watches television or browses at the mall, so does her father, Jose, 38. They share meals and conversation. He carries her medicines in a blue makeup case. She worries if he’s OK. At night, in a room they share, he lies awake until she falls asleep. And each morning, together, they get up and try to get on with their lives.

Rosie and her father cling to one another, they say, because they’ve lost everyone else.

Eleven weeks ago, Rosie’s mother, four brothers and two aunts burned to death when a propane tank exploded in the family motor home. The Garcias were about 60 miles south of Laredo, Tex., on their way to a vacation in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Now, Rosie, who suffered third-degree burns over 70% of her body, is recuperating at another aunt’s home in Gardena, her father at her side.

It is too soon, Jose Garcia says, for them to move back into their house in La Puente. He cannot bear to be reminded of the family that played musical instruments together, watched wrestling on TV, and sat together at Mass on Sunday mornings.

Rosie doesn’t plan to return to school for another year. Her father won’t go back to work as a janitor at a South Pasadena supermarket for at least another couple of months.

Rosie and her father have no immediate plans, other than getting through each day. The tragedy briefly thrust them into the national media spotlight. But, now, the reporters have started to fade from the scene, family friends have resumed their regular routines, and father and daughter have been left alone to re-establish some kind of normalcy--but their lives can never be normal again.

“People come up to me and say, ‘You’re a brave girl,’ ” says Rosie. “But I don’t think I’m brave. I just survived.”

The Garcias were on a summer vacation marked by storytelling, music-making and high spirits, traveling through the small Mexican town of Sabinas Hidalgo.

They were headed for the Yucatan Peninsula and the birthplace of the family matriarch, Rosie’s great-aunt, Serafin Quintal, 85.

On the second day of their journey, propane gas fumes suddenly filled their motor home and it exploded.

Jose Garcia, who was driving, and 19-year-old Gerardo Macias Guerrero, were sitting in the front of the motor home. They were thrown from the vehicle and escaped with minor injuries. Sleeping in the back were Rosie; her mother, Gina, 34; brothers Tony, 15; Richie, 10; Ruben, 8, and Joey, 3; Serafin Quintal, and Aunt Maritza Ocampo, 21.

Seconds before the explosion, Rosie remembers hearing a hissing sound, the noise made by propane--used for cooking--leaking from a tank.

“It woke me and my mother,” Rosie recalls, sitting in an air-conditioned room at her aunt’s home, a blanket covering her lap and legs.

“ ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ ” Rosie says she asked.

She saw her mother run to a generator to switch it off. Then, there was an explosion. Flames engulfed the motor home. Rosie says she heard her mother shout for everyone to run into the bathroom. Rosie began searching for Joey, who had been sprawled on the couch watching a videocassette. But she couldn’t see through the thick black smoke.

“Nobody was moving or crying,” she remembers.

Then she saw her own clothes and body on fire.

“I knew I was burning, but I couldn’t feel anything.” She heard her father’s voice calling outside. “I was thinking, ‘Find the escape window. I’m going to die anyway if I don’t try and jump.’ ”

Rosie tried to jump through the window. Her father grabbed her by the arms, but her burning, peeling skin made her slip from his grip. Garcia put his head through the window and saw Rosie struggling to get back up on a chair, near the body of her elderly aunt. Garcia reached for his daughter again and pulled her to safety.

He then began shouting, “ ‘Everybody, come over here to the window!’ ”

But no one came. Garcia says he heard his youngest son call out faintly, “Papi . . . Papi.” As Garcia tried to reach back inside the motor home, Rosie pleaded with him to stay with her, telling him it was too dangerous, and that he, too, would die. A second explosion occurred, set off by an 80-gallon emergency gas tank.

It was all over in a matter of seconds.

It’s been five weeks since Rosie’s release from the burn center at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital.

In front of her, on the coffee table in her aunt’s home, is the makeup case filled with medicine, including pain killers and sleeping pills and creams that are applied to her new skin.

She is sitting next to her father, looking at photographs of their family. In one, Joey is swinging at a pinata. In another, Tony is talking to friends. And in one Rosie holds up, her mother--a pretty woman with brown eyes and brown shoulder-length hair--is smiling.

Her father reaches for the photograph and studies it for a moment. He is a shy man, and the words he uses to describe his loss don’t come easily.

His wife, he says, “always pushed herself to make life better for our family. We were never without because she always worked hard to make herself better with every job.”

Gina Garcia had worked various jobs throughout their 16 years of marriage, he says, “but she was the happiest when she got her real estate license.”

The Garcia boys loved to play the guitar and the accordion. Tony also played saxophone and piano. He taught himself and then he taught his brothers and his father.

“He’d write a whole mess of songs and they were pretty good,” says Rosie, who also plays the accordion and flute. An honors student at La Puente’s Sierra Vista Middle School, she was a cheerleader and a flutist in the school band.

Tony and his father also played guitar for Mass at St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in La Puente. Tony, a high school athlete, was idolized by his younger brothers and Rosie, Garcia says.

Music, church and sports were the common threads that united the children and kept their parents busy driving them to practice, games and school and church events.

And then there were the jokes.

“Tony told a lot of jokes. He was always making us laugh,” Rosie recalls.

One Christmas, his father says, Tony received a joke book from the family. “He memorized all the jokes,” he says. “He was a good boy. They were all good boys. I had a good relationship with my kids. I was their father. I was their friend.”

Since the accident, Garcia says he and his daughter are facing life “one day at a time. That’s the best way to handle it.” At times, “I can’t think of anything except the memory of my kids. It feels like they are still around. I can hear their voices. It’s hard to lose a family and hard to forget. I don’t feel love for life.”

He says he feels like his world has spun out of control. If it weren’t for Rosie, he would have nothing to live for. Right now, his primary concern is for his daughter’s recovery--which doctors say is nothing short of miraculous.

Rosie went through six weeks of intensive treatment at the Sherman Oaks burn center. In most cases, says her physician, Dr. Richard Grossman, recovery would take six months or longer for someone in her condition.

Grossman, director of the burn center, says Rosie’s physical and inner strength, combined with high-tech medical procedures “and a lot of prayer” have pulled her through her ordeal, despite a 40% chance of survival.

Her face--which was burned, but not scarred--is healing with the aid of skin taken from her scalp. Her hands are covered with skin grafted from her thighs. Her right ear--half of it was burned off--has been reconstructed with plastic surgery. The rest of her body--arms, neck, legs, chest and back--is covered with healthy skin taken from her thighs, a calf and the scalp. Doctors also used cadaver skin, aided by cyclosporine, an anti-rejection drug that fights infection while allowing the skin to “take and hold in,” says Grossman.

Rosie was flown to the center from Mexico five days after the accident. Immediately after the explosion, she was in a small hospital in Sabinas Hidalgo, where she remembers her father shooing away the flies that buzzed over her burns.

A few hours later, she was transferred to a bigger hospital in nearby Monterrey where she remained until father and daughter were flown to Los Angeles International Airport. From there, Rosie was airlifted to Sherman Oaks.

“Because the (Monterrey) hospital was not a burn center, all they could do for her in Mexico was keep her as pain-free as possible,” Grossman says,

Rosie will require continuing treatment for months and perhaps additional surgery during the next year and a half, depending on her progress.

She says she feels good even though her new skin appears raw and scraped. She misses her brown shoulder-length hair, which was seared in the fire, shaved for skin grafts and which has now grown to a Sinead O’Connor length. Most of the time her head is covered by a Dodgers cap when she isn’t wearing a wig that resembles her real hair.

“I want my hair to grow back as much as I want my braces to come off,” she says.

She also can hardly wait for the day when she doesn’t have to wear compression garments. They are tighter than spandex and include leggings, a bodysuit and gloves which she must wear at all times--except during baths--to prevent the new skin from swelling, alleviate itching and prevent the skin from scarring should she accidentally bang a leg or arm on something.

“Rosie doesn’t look at herself as a burn victim. Rosie looks at herself as a burn survivor,” says Grossman. “She has the will to survive even in the face of tragedy.”

Adds Eileen Escudero, a hospital social worker who has become a good friend: “I’ve never, ever seen her want to give up. She gets her inspiration from God and a lot of support from her dad.”

Though the physical pain has eased--except for itching and discomfort from an operation on her right hand and arm, the emotional suffering has not. Rosie has abandoned a journal a hospital therapist asked her to keep because it was too painful to write about the accident and her feelings. She and her father, who is receiving disability benefits until he returns to work this winter, see psychiatrists.

The Garcias also have been aided by Sherman Oaks hospital publicist, Larry Weinberg, who guided them through the maze of media inquiries that began when the accident occurred. In the course of Rosie’s stay at the burn center, more than 100 interview requests were made.

Rosie has begun receiving tutoring at her aunt’s home. And more than $106,000 in donations to a KFWB Radio fund have been placed in a bank account to help defray expenses that included bringing the remains of the Garcia family from Mexico to La Puente for burial.

“At night, she is the one with nerves,” Garcia says. “I’m awake until she falls asleep.”

Rosie says she stays up as late as possible watching television because she’s scared to go to sleep. She doesn’t want to dream.

“Before the funeral I would dream of my family every day,” Rosie says. “After the funeral I stopped.” For a while. Eventually, she began to dream about her mother and brothers again.

“In my dream I started crying and gave my mother a hug. I was saying to her, ‘Why did you leave me?’ Then she began to disappear into a wall. I said, ‘You can disappear? You have special powers?’ And my mother said, ‘Someday I’m going to give you special powers.’ ”

Her father already believes that Rosie is different.

“She survived,” he says. “I think about that a lot. I ask myself, ‘Why did she survive? Only her?’ And I give myself the answer. My reason for living is because Rosie is living. She is here to give me support. I tell her, ‘If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t be here either. I would have killed myself.’ ”

Like her father, Rosie also wonders why she escaped with her life.

“I survived,” she says, “so my dad wouldn’t be alone.”