Diploma Honors Girl’s Recovery, Teacher’s Faith

The sixth-grade graduation ceremony was so important to Esmeralda Pena that she dragged her mother to buy fancy pearl-colored shoes to match a new white dress. Then came the unthinkable.

Esmeralda was just a few feet from the shoe store when a car driven by suspected drunk driver fleeing police veered onto the sidewalk and struck her. The precocious 12-year-old suffered a critical brain injury, lapsed into a coma and appeared to be near death.

But her teacher, Jose Roberto Vasquez, never lost hope. Although nurses said she could not hear or see him, Vasquez took the bus to the hospital twice a day to hold her hand, massage her feet and whisper news of the upcoming graduation.

Fourteen days later, Esmeralda awoke. And on Thursday, Vasquez and her classmates gathered at her hospital room to duplicate the sixth-grade graduation she missed--an event that celebrated not only the girl’s recovery but her teacher’s unwavering devotion as well.

“This was something no one here asked him to do,” said Carmen Garner, principal of 66th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles. “He has children of his own, but they live in Mexico. . . . He had this feeling if this was his child, this is what he’d do.”

The elementary school students wept as a still-groggy Esmeralda sat in a wheelchair at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center and accepted her diploma from Garner. Omar Alfaro, 12, broke down after singing the first few lines of “Heal the World.” He wiped away the tears and finished the tune.

Vasquez, a dapper 46-year-old Mexican native with salt-and-pepper hair, leaned over to embrace his bedridden student, who wore her new white dress for the occasion.

“She’s one of my best pupils,” he said in Spanish. “When she was in the coma, I always told her what we were doing to get ready for the graduation. I doubt if she understood me, but maybe she felt something.”

Francisca Pena, Esmeralda’s mother, celebrated her daughter’s recovery as a miracle that could be attributed to Vasquez’s faith and her own prayers to the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“The only way she could breathe was with a machine,” said Pena, a 38-year-old widow and mother of eight. “I thought she might not live.”

For weeks, a tangle of tubes fed the girl oxygen and drained fluid from her brain.

The family had faced tragedy before. Three years ago this month, Pena’s husband, Timoteo, was shot and killed in a robbery at his grocery store. Esmeralda saw the shooting and survived by diving behind a refrigerator.

The car accident occurred May 25, just after school, when Esmeralda and her mother were standing at Atlantic Boulevard and Gage Avenue in Bell, waiting to cross the street to the shoe store.

Pena can only remember seeing the windshield of the oncoming car, then being thrown to the ground. She was hospitalized for several days and unable to visit her daughter.

Vasquez stepped in.

The schoolteacher traveled repeatedly to County-USC Medical Center, where Esmeralda was first hospitalized. He visited her early in the morning before class and then in the evening, after finishing his night school courses at Cal State L.A.

“I felt very triste , very sad,” Vasquez said. “But I felt the need to be there.”

Back at 66th Street Elementary, Vasquez’s students peppered him with questions about Esmeralda’s condition.

“I tried to be honest with them,” Vasquez said. “I described her injuries and I told them her condition was very grave.”

At one point, he told his students that when he massaged Esmeralda’s feet, they were cold. This prompted a worried, almost panicked response. Why were her feet cold, the students asked. Wasn’t this a sign of impending death? Was it possible she might not recover?

Their fears proved unfounded.

“She’s great, she’s wonderful,” said Dr. Michael Johnston, a brain injury expert who is treating Esmeralda at Rancho Los Amigos’ pediatric rehabilitation unit. “She’s making very good progress for being in such a long coma. She’s alert. She can answer questions. She’s doing really well.”

When her classmates arrived at the hospital, they discovered that Esmeralda’s long hair had been shorn off during surgery. One leg, which had been broken, was in a cast. Shaken by the trauma of their schoolmate’s brush with death, most of the children wept through the ceremony.

Alejandra Reyes, 12, read a letter she had written, pausing often as she was overcome by tears: “We miss you a lot. . . . We want you to come back. . . . We want you to be healthy. . . . Remember that any time of day, we will be there for you.”

Esmeralda, however, could only smile. Classmates and school officials presented her with flowers, a stuffed bear, a copy of the graduation ceremony program, an autograph book signed by the entire class and, finally, the diploma.

“Having met the graduation requirements,” Garner said, “you are now a graduate of 66th Street Elementary School.”

Still stiff and sore from the accident, Esmeralda didn’t say much. Instead, she ran her fingers over the diploma, her fingertips lingering over the principal’s signature.

How did she feel, a classmate asked.

“Fine.”

Did she have a boyfriend, a relative asked.

“No!”

The ceremony ended without a hitch, except for one last touch of irony. She couldn’t wear the new white shoes her mother had bought especially for the ceremony--they didn’t fit. Esmeralda celebrated her graduation in stocking feet.