Father, Daughter Face Grief 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. 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.

On June 25, 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 supermarket janitor 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 spotlight. But 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.”

On the second day of the Garcias’ summer journey, propane gas fumes suddenly filled the family’s motor home and it exploded.

Jose Garcia, who was driving, was 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, Joey, 3; and two aunts.

Seconds before the explosion, Rosie remembers hearing a hissing sound, the noise made by propane--used for cooking--leaking from a tank. “ ‘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 began searching for Joey, but she couldn’t see through the thick black smoke.

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 Rosie slipped from his grip. Garcia put his head through the window and saw Rosie struggling to get back up on a chair. 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. A second explosion occurred, set off by an 80-gallon emergency gas tank. It was over in a matter of seconds.

Two months after her release from the burn center at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital, Rosie sat next to her father, looking at family photographs. In one, Joey is swinging at a pinata. In another, Tony is talking to friends. And in one Rosie holds up, her mother is smiling.

Her father reaches for the photograph and studies it. His wife, he says, “always pushed herself to make life better for our family.” 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 accordion. Rosie, an honor student, was a cheerleader at La Puente’s Sierra Vista Middle School and a flutist in the band.

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.”

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 burn center. In most similar cases, says her physician, Dr. Richard Grossman, recovery would take six months or longer.

Grossman 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. Rosie will require continuing treatment for months and perhaps additional surgery.

The teen-ager says she misses her brown shoulder-length hair, which was seared in the fire and shaved off to allow for skin grafts. Her head is usually covered by a Dodgers cap when she isn’t wearing a wig that resembles her real hair.

“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.”

Although the physical pain has eased, 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, see psychiatrists.

Rosie has begun receiving tutoring at her aunt’s home. And more than $106,000 in donations to a KFWB radio fund were placed in a bank account to help defray expenses.

Rosie says she stays up as late as possible watching television because she’s afraid 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.”