Reeling From a Mother’s Death

With her mother dead and her six younger siblings suddenly left without parents, 18-year-old Karla Becerra’s first instinct was to cry and grasp for answers. Her second instinct was to steel herself, get to her brothers and sisters in South Los Angeles and take over.

Karla raced back from Santa Barbara, hugged her brother Juan Carlos and made a vow.

“You know what? You’re going to be OK,” she recalled saying. “I know I’m 18, but I’m here for you guys. I’ve been taking care of you since we were in Mexico. I can do it again. And I can do it millions of times, and you guys are going to help me.”

“She wants us to all be together,” 17-year-old Juan Carlos said in front of his uncle Ricardo’s home, near where a wreath of pink roses stood. “Because that’s what our mom wanted: for us to all be together.”

But the aftermath of this family tragedy would be more complicated.

To Karla, it was clear: She would step up to lead the shattered family, keeping all the siblings together.

But some in the extended family were not so sure. Could this kid, a new single mother who had experienced so much trouble in her own past, really become a mother to seven overnight? Wouldn’t it be better for all if the children were divided up among family?

The answer came slowly and painfully over the last week, after much debate and some tears.

*

Rosa Carrera, 34, and her husband, Daniel Dorantes, 35, were killed last week when a parolee just out of prison allegedly plowed a stolen tow truck into people waiting for a bus in Vernon. Another woman, Juana Rios, 43, also died.

The couple left behind seven children, six of whom Rosa had from a previous, turbulent marriage in Mexico. The parents died just days before they were to move to Bakersfield to start a new life in a larger apartment in a more tranquil neighborhood.

In many ways, Karla’s proclamation was like a prodigal child returning to try to wrap her arms around a situation and make things right. In the cramped living room of the home of one of her uncles containing a table with votive candles and walls decorated with crucifixes and a painting of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the teenager recalled memories of their mother that were not pleasant -- involving many tears, recriminations and disappointments.

Rosa Carrera wanted her daughter to study, to reach higher than she had been able to in her native Irapuato, Mexico. Instead, Karla said, she skipped classes, hung out with gang members and ran away. She left to start anew with an aunt in Santa Barbara, then got pregnant in her senior year, putting her graduation in peril.

“I was the most rebellious of the family,” Karla said. “I remember seeing my mother sad and crying. She said, ‘I feel sad because I want you to do well. I brought you here so you could succeed, and you’re not giving me that joy.’ ”

But as much as the self-styled rebel wanted to carry her siblings on her shoulders, the reality of the situation was sinking in.

A day later, on Wednesday, as she picked through belongings in her mother’s and stepfather’s home on East 46th Street, the street-tough teenager looked shell-shocked and confused. Her young face looked hard.

“I can’t do it,” she said, her eyes diverted. “They told me that can’t be.”

As family and friends mourn the couple, everyone seems to agree on what Rosa Carrera wanted for her children: an education, and for them to keep together, even for the most routine family rituals. Exactly how it’s going to be done is the subject of many talks that will have to take place amid a consuming grief.

As neighbors and co-workers at the seafood packing company that Rosa toiled long hours for sat in the hushed waiting room of the Biby and Belyea Mortuary in South Gate, they recalled her determination that her children stay close in a tough neighborhood.

“She didn’t even want them to eat apart,” neighbor Elena Fernandez said. “She was a real woman. She was a real mother. That lady struggled very hard for her children and her family.”

Rosa Carrera had left Mexico more than nine years ago. She worked more than two jobs in the garment industry, as a waitress and cleaning houses for two years before she was able to bring her first three children to the United States.

With Daniel Dorantes, whom she met about a year after coming to the U.S., she had a boy, Daniel. Karla had learned to care for her brothers and sisters in Mexico -- dressing, feeding and bathing them -- while under the guardianship of her grandmother.

She did well in school when she applied herself, but she was increasingly falling under the sway of gang members and troubled girls. At times, Rosa would have to leave her job to tend to her daughter after another report from school.

When two of their other daughters started to have some of the same problems, Rosa quickly got them into a youth camp, though she cried about it.

Three years ago, Karla moved in with an aunt in Santa Barbara. Her school work improved, but then last year she got pregnant. Her aunt, Eva Carrera, urged her to get her diploma, even if it meant getting a home teacher.

On May 9, she gave birth to a boy, Paul. On June 16, as her mother watched, Karla walked onto a stage and got her high school diploma as she held her baby.

*

On the night of the accident, Karla was coaxed to her aunt’s home. She knew something horrible had happened.

“Everyone was in my aunt’s room, and they were crying,” she recalled. “And my aunt was eating her nails and grabbing her hair and she was walking around, like she didn’t have a place to stay.”

Karla said her baby was taken from her arms and she was given the news. She began to cry.

“I went crazy. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “But then I thought about my brothers and sisters, and I thought, ‘I can’t be like this. They need me right now.’ ”

She was determined to move them to the home she shared with her boyfriend.

“She told me she was going to fight so they would not be separated,” neighbor Elena Fernandez said.

But her uncles and aunts told her she was not capable of caring for so many children, particularly the youngest ones. Although she had made strides, they thought her ill equipped for such a heavy responsibility.

“I told her, ‘You can help them, but you can’t put so much on yourself,’ ” Eva Carrera recalled. “ ‘You’re going to have to make sure your little brothers go to school. None of this ‘I don’t feel like going, and you saying, OK, you don’t have to go.’ You would have to take responsibility for all of them, from the youngest to the oldest.’ ”

It was after a meeting with a lawyer Tuesday that Karla finally relented.

The family had decided, at least tentatively, that the second oldest, Juan Carlos, 17, would stay with his uncle Ricardo in South L.A. Ricardo said he probably would seek a larger home to accommodate his own three young children and his nephew.

The rest of the children -- Rocio, 15; Reyna, 13; Mariela, 11; Victor, 9; and Daniel, 6 -- will move as planned to Bakersfield, with their uncle Sergio, a gardener.

“I’m determined to care for them and give them the education my sister always wanted for them,” he said

Ricardo Carrera said it wouldn’t be easy, as was evidenced by an interaction he had with Victor this week.

“I told him, ‘Mijo, we’re going to love you very much. We’re going to give it a lot of [effort] so you are happy,’ ” he said. “What do you like? What do you want? He said: ‘My mom.’ ”

The uncle paused.

“You know, it leaves you with a big knot in your throat,” he said.

On Wednesday night, family and friends gathered at a mortuary to say a rosary and view Rosa Carrera and Daniel Dorantes one last time.

Karla stood stoically before her mother’s casket while her other sisters cried. The youngest of the children, Victor and Daniel -- wearing dark suits -- were more inscrutable. A well-wisher quietly regretted that the couple would be buried apart.

“How sad it is that they will be separated and sent on their own way,” she said.

On Thursday, they gathered again, this time for the funeral Mass at St. Helen’s Catholic Church in South Gate. After the service, two hearses took the caskets back to the mortuary, in preparation for one final trip Monday -- he to his hometown in the Mexican state of Guerrero, she to Irapuato, in the state of Guanajuato.

Standing on the church steps, Sergio Carrera tried to make sense of the tragedy, and reflected on its timing. It was mere days after she had left him her children in preparation for the family’s move out of their cramped South L.A. home.

“Who knows why God does certain things, right?” he asked. “It was less than a week ago that she delivered them to me.... I think maybe things happen as they’re supposed to.”

Karla said she was not sure what her next step would be. She had applied to take classes at Santa Barbara City College. She wants to be a nurse.

And as for her siblings? “Whatever they think is best,” she said. “Whatever my brothers want.”