Injured Girl Looks Past Tragedy Toward a Promising Future

Half-hidden behind bandages and intravenous tubes, Esmerelda Estrada looked up at her teachers and her family.

“Don’t cry,” she told them.

Three days earlier, a drag racer had hit the family’s car head-on as they drove to a Santa Ana park to play baseball. Her father, Jose, was dead. Her sister Michelle, 6, was hooked to a respirator and soon would die. Esmerelda, who turned 11 the day after the accident that crushed half her face, was facing two painful operations to reconstruct her skull, eye socket and jaw.

“Not one word about herself,” said Michael Hanson, who had been her fifth-grade teacher at Pio Pico Elementary School in Santa Ana. “She was more concerned about her sister than herself. A lot of adults wouldn’t be that way.”

Until recently, Hanson had figured Esmerelda would be one of those students he would see again only to celebrate her triumphs.

He had big dreams for this tall, quiet girl, who begged him to teach her algebraic equations and--coincidentally--spent her spare time lobbying for traffic safety in the very neighborhood where her family was struck.

But as Esmerelda lay in the hospital bed with sobbing family members all around her, she became more than just a beloved former student in need: She also became a teacher.

“It’s about just putting up with things and going on,” Hanson said, his voice breaking. “I’ve learned from her to be more patient. To be more careful in how I deal with things. To be altruistic. I’m amazed. I hope I would have such strength.”

Hanson has gone to the hospital every day since reading in the newspaper of the Aug. 3 accident. When Esmerelda returned home Thursday, he went to her house at the first opportunity. Other teachers, who had Esmerelda in years past, visit too, as does the principal and the office staff. They have also set up a fund to pay her medical expenses and her family’s funeral costs.

The outpouring stunned the pediatric nurses.

“This is something different,” nurse Teresa Nicasio said. “It’s like another supportive family.”

When Esmerelda’s mother, Ana Margarita, took Michelle’s body back to Mexico for burial, it was Hanson and Lisa Soloman, Esmerelda’s first-grade teacher, who sat with the girl’s aunts and uncles during her surgeries.

“Her family is so distraught, every time she starts talking, they start crying,” Soloman said. “But after the first couple of days, she wanted to talk about school or other things.”

Her teachers can do that. And they say they hope they would do the same for any of their students.

But with her quiet leadership, love of learning and supportive family, Esmerelda is special. She embodied their hopes that a low-income child from a crowded urban public school could succeed.

They want to reassure her--and themselves--that her dreams don’t have to change because of a tragedy. At schools like Pio Pico, teachers need children like Esmerelda to believe in, just as much as students need caring teachers.

“She’s one of those kids--teaching her was a dream,” Hanson said. “I’ve had a lot of bright kids, but she has more than the intelligence. She also has this quiet, deeper level that you don’t often see in a kid that age. . . . I hope my daughter grows up to be just like her.”

It is Wednesday, 12 days after the accident. Esmerelda sits in the hospital’s playroom with Hanson and Soloman.

She has endured two surgeries. Her right eye is sealed shut. Thick black stitches crisscross her cheek. Metal braces protrude from her swollen lips, where her jaw has been wired together.

Even so, she looks calm and dignified in her blue hospital gown and robe, sitting in a tiny red chair and talking about her trip to Sacramento last year to lobby for safer streets in her neighborhood.

Esmerelda teamed up with a group of friends at Pio Pico two years ago to research traffic fatalities and speeding problems.

Police plan to charge the man they say drove his car into the Estrada family as soon as he is released from the hospital. They are looking for the driver he was allegedly racing.

“It’s really sad,” Esmerelda says. “Really, really sad. I miss my dad.”

She used to love to watch baseball games with him. They were Angel fans, and when the team played badly, they would howl with frustration.

“He always talked to me,” she said. “He told me how much he loves me, and he said he is proud of me.”

“We’re a lot alike,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “My dad is tall and I’m tall. He was smart and I’m smart. He likes art and I like art. And we have the same birthday.”

A few nights after the accident, she dreamed of her father.

“I dreamed that he was still alive,” she said. “He hugged me.”