A Miracle at a Time : Girl’s Gradual Recovery From Crash Injuries Gives Family Hope

In the wake of their tragic year, 14-year-old Barbara Du Bois and her family have found comfort in simple miracles.

Barbara was given only a 10% chance of surviving a devastating June car accident that killed her sister and two other girls. But she was released from the hospital last month, a holiday gift that has given her family a much-needed injection of hope.

Barbara can walk the few steps to the mailbox in front of the Santa Clarita mobile home that she and her grandmother share, but for longer distances she needs a wheelchair. Her injuries also left her with a diminished mental capacity--she is now doing second-grade schoolwork. She has just returned to the weekly church group meetings that were a focal point in her life before the accident.

Seeing Barbara in this condition has been hard on her grandmother and guardian, Mary McWilliams, especially during the holidays.

“You cry about it, you worry about it,” McWilliams said. But the joy that she derives from Barbara’s progress has made it possible for McWilliams to partly forget her troubles.

“Everything else,” McWilliams said, “is trivial.”

Before the accident, Barbara was a student at Canyon High School in Santa Clarita. She was so close to her 15-year-old sister, JoKema, that they shared a bedroom even though her grandmother’s home had an extra bedroom.

The two girls attended weekly youth group gatherings at Canyon Country Assembly of God Church. The sisters and three friends were on their way home from one of those meetings June 1 when tragedy struck.

JoKema, who reportedly had taken the keys to her grandmother’s 1986 Chrysler LeBaron without permission, was weaving the car back and forth on Seco Canyon Road in Saugus to amuse passenger Jesika Noell, 3. The car drifted across the center divider and slammed head-on into two vehicles.

JoKema, Jesika and one of Barbara’s best friends, Gena Watkinson, 15, were killed in the crash. Barbara and Alicia Acevedo, 14, were hospitalized in critical condition, though Alicia was released several weeks later.

Barbara underwent several surgeries, but her face could not be entirely reconstructed. Her cheekbones and nose are flattened, and she wears makeup to cover the scars on her face.

Glimpses of the spunky youngster that Barbara was before the accident are now starting to resurface. She chatted enthusiastically about the Christmas presents that she had made for her family and about her hopes of working with children when she grows up--a goal that she had before the accident.

But good humor sometimes disappears, replaced by sudden anger or confusion.

“She’s aware that she is not like she used to be,” McWilliams said.

Once it became apparent that Barbara would survive, doctors at Northridge Hospital Medical Center predicted that she would require 24-hour-a-day, lifelong care.

“She is more functional (than predicted), but she still can’t be left alone,” McWilliams said.

But church members have faith that Barbara will again surprise her doctors and make a full recovery.

McWilliams isn’t quite that optimistic yet, but she allows herself to believe that it is possible that Barbara could again be the perky, relatively untroubled granddaughter she knew before the accident.

“It’s a miracle,” McWilliams said. “She’s already a miracle to have made it this far.”