Women Find Strength in a Tragic Bond

Cindy Soto vividly remembers that Monday morning in May. Her daughter wore a Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt, brown corduroy pants and light-up sneakers.

Soto fixed her daughter’s hair and kissed her goodbye. As the little girl skipped across the day-care playground, flashing her gaptoothed smile at Miss Debbie, her favorite teacher, Soto called out, “Bye, baby. I’ll see you later.”

But she wouldn’t.

Later that afternoon, Steve Allan Abrams drove his car through the fence around the Costa Mesa day-care center’s playground, killing 4-year-old Sierra and another preschooler, 3-year-old Brandon Wiener.

Today, a year and a half later, Abrams will be sentenced. He was convicted of first-degree murder in August after a trial in which he said voices urged him to “execute” innocent children. The jury recommended that he spend the rest of his life in prison.

Soto said she would not attend the sentencing; she is still too hurt and angry.

Yet in the time since her daughter’s death, a friendship has begun among four Orange County women whose lives have been interwoven by tragedy, with Soto as an unlikely support for others who lost their toddlers.

Pamela Wiener of Costa Mesa, Susan St. Clair, 34, of Laguna Beach and Sarah Key-Marer, 31, of Huntington Beach have very different lives and backgrounds but they, like Soto, have experienced what every parent fears most: the death of a child.

“I can’t take away their pain,” said Soto, 36, a Costa Mesa resident. “I can’t tell them the pain goes away with time, because it doesn’t. . . . All you can do is survive, to show them that you can.”

Soto tries to live as an example. She tries to be strong, offering whatever advice and support she can.

Soto and Wiener both lost their children when Abrams rammed his 4,000-pound Cadillac across the playground, pinning the youngsters under the tires of the car. Although they cope and grieve differently, they understand each other’s loss better than anyone else.

“My friends and family have been wonderful, but it’s different,” Wiener said. “Having [Cindy Soto] in my life . . . helped me through a very difficult time.”

Sometimes help has come in the form of diversion. The two would spend an evening singing karaoke or just having dinner together.

“We have that common bond,” Wiener said.

Mostly, their time is devoted to working for the causes they share: increased safety around playgrounds and legislation mandating treatment for mental patients.

“Losing your child in the same incident . . . is such an intimate, profound level of feeling,” Soto said. “Pam and I deal with it very different, but we can relate to the same feelings. . . . There’s [friendship] and empathy because of what happened.”

Sarah Key-Marer lost her 4-year-old daughter, Lauren, on Nov. 10, when the girl fell off a cliff on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“I remember reading about [Soto’s loss],” Key-Marer said. “I was thankful to God it wasn’t my child. But I also felt compassion for Cindy. Then a year and a half later I have my own tragedy.”

Key-Marer contacted Soto after her daughter died, and the two were drawn together because of several similarities.

Both have been single mothers. The girls were the same age when they died. They are buried at the same cemetery. The two girls even parted their hair the same way.

“It’s nice that we can come together and talk about it, [because] it’s all I want to talk about,” Key-Marer said.

Susan St. Clair and her husband, Pacific Symphony conductor Carl St. Clair, lost their 18-month-old boy, Cole, in a swimming pool accident July 26, 1999, after Susan fell unconscious in a diabetic seizure.

Later that year, Soto said, she met St. Clair at Pacific View Cemetery in Newport Beach where Cole, like Sierra and Lauren, is buried. Brandon is buried at Mount Sinai Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Susan St. Clair declined to be interviewed for this story. She recently gave birth to a girl.

The four women look to each other for support and for the advice that no one else can give them.

They talk about their children, about spending the holidays without them. They talk of survival.

“Depressing is not the word; it’s too nice,” Key-Marer said. “People can attempt to understand, but nobody really knows. I can’t think of anything worse.”

The four women do what they have done since losing their children: remind themselves to breathe, to go on with life as best they can.

“You don’t want to be here anymore, because your kid isn’t,” Soto said. “Other people, even in their darkest hour, will never reach that low point.”