One Battle Too Many in Brave Struggle

When the subject of a final wish came up, Danny Verdugo told his little sister Vanessa he knew just what he wanted.

A million dollars and a Cadillac.

That was the teenager’s idea of a joke, says Daniel Thomas Verdugo’s mother, Elaine Marshall. What he really wanted was to walk across the stage Saturday in Lake View Terrace and collect his diploma from Phoenix Academy, a residential substance abuse treatment facility for adolescents.

He’d come a long way, his family tells me in the living room of their little house in La Puente. Just a few years ago he hung out with knuckleheads and hoods, messed around with dope and got tossed out of school.

He still had an attitude when his mother got him into Phoenix two years ago, says counselor Lillian Mancilla.

“I called it ‘little man’ syndrome,” says Mancilla. Danny was slight and felt as though he always had to prove himself.

His father wasn’t around much, his big brother was in jail, and his mother had been sick and struggled to provide. Danny, the man of the house as a young teen, felt both abandoned and depended on before he was old enough to drive.

But after a while at Phoenix, he got it. He realized he was adding to the problems he’d inherited, and he decided to fight his own worst instincts. Part of his recovery involved going around the city and telling other kids not to make the same goofball mistakes he had made.

He got excited about the Phoenix culinary arts program -- thanks in part to instructor Chris Roberts, who took a liking to Danny -- and decided to become a chef. He even started going to church, and recruited little sisters Vanessa, 11, and Dominique, 6, to go with him.

Danny moved home last summer for the one-year outpatient part of the program. He tested clean and stayed out of trouble, and although his first job was nothing to brag about, Danny told everyone that working at Subway was just a start. He had a line on a chef’s gig at a Cheesecake Factory.

Everything was fine, says his mother, until he complained of headaches late last year and once lost his balance, falling to the living room floor.

A doctor said it was the flu, but the headaches got worse in December and unbearable in January. Marshall took her son to one hospital after another and ended up at UCLA, where Danny, then 17, was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“It was three tumors,” says Marshall’s mother, Lillian.

“Yes, Mother,” says Marshall, “but they operated on the big one and said he’d be fine.”

He wasn’t. After the operation, Danny was paralyzed on one side and could barely speak.

“They said he was terminal,” his grandmother says.

Elaine Marshall refused to believe it.

“I beat cancer twice,” she says. “Breast cancer and lung cancer.”

There’s silence in the room, and Marshall’s daughters look on without expression. Then Elaine’s mother tells me she survived breast cancer too, and lost a husband to colon cancer.

I look back at Marshall and see the curse. It’s in her eyes, and it’s in the spooky silence. I can only imagine the questions Marshall must ask herself.

Why Danny and not her? Will cancer come after her again? Are her daughters jinxed too? And what did any of them do to deserve this?

If both she and her mother survived cancer, Marshall told herself, surely Danny could. He’d reclaimed his life in the span of 18 months and deserved a break, not a death sentence. Surely he’d find his strength.

But Danny knew all along that he was dying, Marshall says. He’d lie in his bedroom, and his sisters would climb up and try to get a smile out of him, thumb-wrestling their big brother and tangling their legs in his, and he’d tell them in sign language that he loved them.

If he could hold on a little longer, they all thought, he’d complete his two years at Phoenix and be able to get that diploma. Not long ago, someone came out to the house to measure him for his cap and gown.

But Vanessa knew what was coming. She wrote a poem called “Rest in Peace,” which asked, “Why him, the greatest lifetime friend?”

Vanessa and I sat together in Danny’s bedroom, next to a collage of his life -- from baby photos to his girlfriend’s sweet 16 party -- and read the poem.

“I know you wanted him,” Vanessa wrote, “but he belongs here! Here with his friends and family, together. We were supposed to grow old. I love you Danny.”

Danny turned 18 on July 17. Three days later, he was dead.

Winnie Wechsler, executive director at Phoenix, says Danny’s name will be the last of 40 called out Saturday at the graduation ceremony.

“He died feeling he had achieved something really important to him,” says Wechsler. “He was probably as big a success as we could ever imagine, and he is a symbol to the other kids.”

When Danny’s name is called, his mother will stand. She will then walk across the stage -- broken, haunted, proud -- and collect her son’s diploma.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.