An Untimely End to the Love of a Lifetime

It was in a small African village that Tadesse Iassu first glimpsed Neghsty Gberykeros, the young girl who would become his wife at age 11, give birth to their 12 children and join him in trading their past in Eritrea for their children’s future in America.

Last week, Iassu, 62, watched Gberykeros, the love of his life, die on an Anaheim street.

“Forty-four years, all those years, they were never separated,” said Petros Woldu, 35, a son-in-law who lives in San Jose. “The bad thing about it is she died right in front of him.”

Gberykeros, 54, was killed about 1 p.m. Friday when she was struck by a flatbed construction truck backing up in traffic lanes on West Elm Street, Anaheim police said. The incident occurred as the couple crossed the street less than half a mile from the modest two-bedroom apartment they shared with three of their children, the youngest age 16.

Anaheim police identified the driver as John Edward Lilley of Whittier. Investigator Vince Delgado declined to discuss details, saying that the investigation was continuing. No citation was issued.

For the family, the details are largely moot. In the days since, some 800 people have come by, they said, most of them fellow Eritrean immigrants drawn by a sense of communal loss and communal pain.

Mehari Tecklikiel, 67, of San Bernardino, a longtime family friend, said the outpouring was the measure of a life.

“I am a witness. I know she is in heaven now,” he said. “What I learned from her is that when you die, you find how much people loved you.”

The flood of support and grief led friends from St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church to erect a special tarped receiving area in a parking lot behind the apartment complex.

On Monday, two dozen metal folding chairs lined the three-sided enclosure, a temporary temple to the permanence of grief. Iassu sat, his face strained, on an upholstered couch beneath the tarp, sipping tea and greeting new arrivals with hugs and tears.

His children served as protectors.

“He’s not doing real well,” said a son, Aron Tadesse, 32, of San Diego, declining to let reporters talk to him. “She was his life for many, many years.”

Martha Gallegos, manager of the Daisy Apartments, where Gberykeros lived, said her death stole a light of life from the neighborhood. The sense of loss, she said, was all the more remarkable because of the short time Gberykeros had lived there. The couple and three of their children had moved in last July from an apartment three miles away.

“You know how people nowadays are afraid to smile and say hello? She was not like that,” Gallegos said. “She was just amazing. . . . Her nickname from everybody here was Sunshine.”

‘She Was a Good Lady to Everybody’

Of the family’s 12 children, 11 were born in Eritrea, in northeastern Africa, and moved to the U.S. around 1985. Dawite, the eldest, was killed fighting Ethiopia for Eritrean independence in 1984. Seven of the other children attended college and have branched out into the world on their own, a remarkable achievement for a family supported financially by Gberykeros’ assembly-line work through a temporary placement agency.

Two other children are in college now; the two youngest--Segan, 17, and Temesgen, 16--are still in school.

The past is unchangeable, the future uncertain. Daughter Nazert Tadesse, 26, a nursing assistant at Pacific Haven Healthcare in Garden Grove, said she will move out of her Santa Ana apartment and back in with her father to help care for the younger children, particularly Temesgen, who has Down syndrome.

“We’re going to hang in there,” she said. “But it’s going to take a while.”

Habton Tedla, 55, of Santa Rosa grew up in the same small village of 500 as Gberykeros and remembers her as a young girl playing with sheep and goats, then as an 11-year-old bride.

“She was bright; she loved to play,” Tedla said. “She was like my sister. She was a good lady to everybody.”

As the political situation in Eritrea deteriorated in the late ‘70s, Iassu, a government accountant, and Gberykeros decided to leave for Sudan, Nazert Tadesse said. They spent weeks in 1981 walking from village to village, always at night to avoid soldiers and the African sun, carrying the younger of the 11 children. They lived in Sudan for about four years before getting permission to move to the U.S., settling first in Philadelphia, then moving on to Orange County.

While in Sudan, the eldest son was forcibly conscripted by Eritrean rebels as a soldier, and he was later killed in the fighting, the daughter said.

Although Iassu worked in factories to support the family in Sudan, by the time they reached Anaheim, he was disabled by a back disorder. So Gberykeros went to work, earning money to keep the household afloat and help direct the children toward college.

“My parents always thought that education was the best thing we could have,” Nazert Tadesse said.

That belief was backed by deep religious faith, said Mary Ohanian, president of St. John the Baptist’s Philoptochos Society (Friends of the Poor). The family had little money, yet Gberykeros regularly baked cakes for church fund-raisers and was a steady volunteer.

“She always treated us like we were so much better, with mannerisms like bowing to us and smiling and touching as a way of communication,” Ohanian said Tuesday from the Anaheim church, at 405 N. Dale St., where a memorial service is scheduled for 1 p.m. today. “She was always there to help us. . . . We all loved her because of her sweetness and her concern for her family.”

Her children said Gberykeros had been happy in America. Her family defined her life, and it pleased her that her 11 surviving children were in California, Aron Tadesse said.

Yet she won’t stay here. Her husband will fly back to Eritrea next week with one of their sons to bury Gberykeros near her home village, where Iassu first saw her.