The Heart of a Survivor

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 was to die. Esmerelda, who celebrated her 11th birthday 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 at that moment, 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 had gone to the hospital every day since reading a newspaper account of the Aug. 3 accident. When Esmerelda went home Thursday, he went to visit her at the first opportunity. Other teachers, who had Esmerelda in class in years past, visited too, as did the principal and office staff. They have 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,” said nurse Teresa Nicasio. “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 her 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 for the future don’t have to change because of a horrible 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.”

Esmerelda Lobbied for Safer Santa Ana Streets

It is a 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 shut.

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 officials 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. No one ever imagined the issue would become so personal for her family.

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 still 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 Angels 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.”

The date: Aug. 4, the day after the accident. From now on, she will have to celebrate her birthday alone.

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

“I dreamed that he was still alive,” she said. “He hugged me. I thought my dad would never die. I thought my parents would be here forever.”

She draws a deep breath and changes the subject, to how happy she is to leave the hospital. And soon, she will go back to school.

Esmerelda is looking forward to starting sixth grade at Mendez Fundamental Intermediate School, a challenging magnet campus in Santa Ana with harder classes and stricter standards. If she’s feeling up to it, she will try to join the rest of her class when school starts Sept. 4.

“I like learning and having fun at the same time,” she said, with a small smile at her teachers. “I like having friends around me. I like algebra. I like solving problems.”

Her mother waited in line overnight to secure her daughter a place at the popular junior high school. It is a typical gesture in a family committed to education, her teachers say. Her mother and father worked split shifts, he in the morning and she in the evening, so a parent was always around to attend school functions or help with homework.

But now, with her husband dead, Ana Margarita must figure out how to support her two remaining daughters. Esmerelda’s youngest sister, Clarabell, 3, was not seriously hurt in the crash.

Sometimes, Esmerelda’s teachers worry about how she will make it through the next few months. Now that she’s home, she must confront the absence of her father and sister.

“She’s on track to have a lot of success,” Hanson said. “I don’t know what this instability will do to someone. It scares me, knowing she has lost the two most important people to her, her father and her sister. I hope she will be able to see how important her academic promise is. I hope it doesn’t turn into her getting a job as soon as she is old enough.”

But that is not one of Esmerelda’s worries. Like her father before her, she said, she plans to do well in school.

“I like to draw. I like science,” she said. “My mom and dad always told me, do your best. Try to be someone.”

A fund has been set up for donations to help with the family’s funeral and medical expenses: Estrada Relief Fund, Downey Savings and Loan, 2840 Bristol St., Santa Ana, CA 92704.