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On the afternoon of what would have been his second birthday, José Emanuel Hernandez Sixtos was loaded onto Aero México Flight 409 at JFK International Airport and flown to Mexico for burial.
In York, his three oldest sisters clipped shiny balloons to the chain-link fence in front of their charred house at 217 Kings Mill Road. This was the house where they had lived together, where the baby they called "Chabelito" perished in the arms of their pregnant mother. This was the house where a December fire also took the lives of their father and 12-year-old sister, Gema.
Karen, 19, tries to make herself understand it is real. How could God let this happen? She struggles now even to believe he exists.
Cristal, 16, has become the
Elena, 14, fights survivor's guilt. She can't figure out how she got out and how Gema, younger and more athletic, didn't.
January 11, their little brother's birthday.
The girls stood in front of the house where they spent some of the best times of their lives. This house, now home only to the spirits of five angels - all they have left to help them form a new family.
José and Araceli Hernandez met as teenagers at the fruit-packing plant Araceli's mother ran in San José del Progreso, a small town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. They married, and saved money to build a house of their own.
In the early 1990s, José came to Pennsylvania, traveling thousands of miles from everything he knew to pick apples. Araceli followed about six months later with their three young daughters.
They wanted a better life.
José and Araceli eventually found steady work. Araceli's brother, José Sixtos, had already established himself in York, so he helped the family settle in.
About five years ago, José Sixtos told his sisters Araceli and Isalia they could live in his duplex on Kings Mill Road. They'd take over the mortgage payments until he could put the title in their names.
José Hernandez worked on improving the house to accommodate his growing family. Araceli had just given birth to their first son and was pregnant with a second. They wanted their children to focus on education and careers.
José Sixtos said his sister and brother-in-law missed Mexico, but they had a good life here: "I think these were the happiest years of their lives."
After school on Dec. 14, Cristal and Gema went to their cousins' house next door. Elena cleaned the
Karen had stayed home from work that day. Her little brother, José Emanuel, watched TV until bedtime. Their parents were at work. Araceli got home from United Foods in New Oxford just before midnight; José from CWork Solutions in Emigsville about an hour later.
Karen was asleep in her third-floor bedroom then, but she imagines her father might have been putting vaporu on his forehead to calm the frequent migraine headaches he got, which kept him from sleeping well.
He always thought he was going to die from the headaches, but it's easy to believe that his problems sleeping might have allowed him to save the lives of his oldest daughters.
Karen awoke to banging and yells. "I didn't know what the hell was going on. I
Karen ran down the stairs to the second floor.
She couldn't see anyone. The fire chased her back.
She stacked speakers in front of a window and climbed up.
Below, her uncle José Gomez, who lived in the other half of the duplex, yelled for her to jump.
She did.
"I feel like a fool, like I was selfish because I just saved myself," she said later.
York police detective Troy Cromer, who arrived on the scene minutes after the call came in, said afterward he thinks it was the best thing Karen could have done. "She says she panicked, but I think she made a wise decision."
Cristal and Elena jumped from the second-floor balcony to
There wasn't much police or firefighters could do.
They tried to keep the scene clear. They shepherded the hysterical girls to medics and called the police department chaplains.
At York Hospital, the chaplains confirmed what the girls had already guessed - their family didn't make it.
Two days later, mourners packed their uncle Fidencio Hernandez's home, just blocks from their burned-out house. They brought food, clothes and condolences.
Fidencio's wife, Valentina, barely left the kitchen, cooking vats of rice and mole sauce.
In the living room, Spanish-speaking friends and neighbors sat on couches and white plastic chairs. They spoke little, staring at the walls and floor. Theirs is a culture where presence matters as much as deeds, yet they brought candles and cola, frames for photographs and plastic jars to collect donations for the girls.
In an upstairs bedroom, Cristal and Elena burrowed into a double bed together, alternately dozing and staring blankly at the walls.
"What's the matter? You cold?" Cristal asked, pulling the hood of Elena's sweatshirt over her sister's face. "Try to go to sleep, OK?"
Maybe then it would turn out to be just a bad dream. When they awoke, everything would be like before.
The television in the next room blasted cartoons. Below, visitors talked and moved about.
But in that bedroom, the two sisters lay enveloped in stillness and silence.
What 18-year-old ever expects she'll go to the mall and shop for clothing to bury her parents in?
The chore fell to Karen, as the oldest.
Two days after the fire, she returned to her uncle's house with a bag of clothes. Her dad wasn't a suit-and-tie kind of guy, so she bought him a simple white shirt.
In the upstairs hallway, overwhelmed by her thoughts of him, she burst into tears. She pounded the wall with her bandaged wrist.
"I want everybody to know my dad was the best father ever, and he came here so we could have a better life," she sobbed. "We were poor, but he always had food for us. He put us before himself - that's why he didn't make it."
Her boyfriend, Gustavo Garcia, rubbed her shoulders and said nothing.
"We grew up here. We speak English," she said. "And now, we don't have nothing."
When school let out that Monday, friends filled the upstairs bedroom.
Daily Record/Sunday News - Carrie Hamilton
Their friends perched on the bed and flipped through a photo album salvaged from the house.
"Just don't sit on my brother's blanket," Cristal warned them, pulling the Winnie the Pooh fleece toward her.
When they finished with the album, Cristal pushed it away. "Can you put that away somewhere? I don't want to smell that. We'll have to get a new one."
Elena struggled, once again, to understand how she made it out but Gema didn't.
"She was quicker than me and so athletic. I thought it would be me instead of her."
She can't understand why her mom didn't toss her little brother out the side window, or try to jump herself. Her guess is that her parents and Gema went back to find Karen, not knowing she had jumped.
Cromer said he believes Araceli was overcome by the smoke. "With all the heat and everything going on, it can become a blur," he said. "Even if she was leaning out the window, she wouldn't have gotten fresh air. There was so much smoke and toxic fumes pouring out of that building."
Elena's friend tried to comfort her: "How does the saying go? The good ones always die."
"I don't feel anything," Elena said. "I don't feel like they're dead."
"I would give anything to have them back. But I know that's impossible."
Fidencio arrived home after dark Monday night, when the colored Christmas lights blinked out front and shiny garland sparkled under the porch light, masking the sadness inside.
He climbed the stairs with a weight usually reserved for the elderly or injured. His hands overflowed with manila folders, papers and a cell phone. As brothers of the deceased, he and Araceli's brother José Sixtos bore the business burden of unexpected death.
It had been a day of meetings - with the funeral director and representatives of The Salvation Army church, where José and Araceli worshipped.
Just a few weeks before the fire, José Hernandez had joked to his sister-in-law Veronica Sixtos that when he died, they would have to send his body to Mexico for burial. "I said, 'I hope you leave me the money to do it, too,'" she recalled.
Now, those words haunted the family, as they struggled to navigate a maze of paperwork and bureaucracy. They didn't know if it would be possible. The money they'd need - thousands for each of the deceased - was more than any of them had imagined.
Fidencio assured Karen he'd do whatever it took to make her father's wishes a reality.
Tuesday afternoon, cousins and friends gathered around the couch at Fidencio Hernandez's house and listened as Elena read aloud from Gema's school writing journal.
Elena read how Gema liked her name because it was unique. It made her feel connected to the grandmother in Mexico she was named for but had never met.
One of their little cousins came down the stairs and asked for Gema's Christmas story "Pepe the Peach," written on hole-punched pages and bound with yarn. She wanted to read it to her younger siblings.
Cristal reluctantly handed it over. "Just don't let nobody mess it up, OK?"
Earlier that day, Cris had made a solo journey through a hole in her aunt and uncle's side of their duplex, in search of anything she could find.
"It was hard, but I prayed," she said. "I asked my mom and dad to be with me. I tried to think of it not as my house, but as someone else's."
The success of her mission sparkled on her wrist - her dad's gold bracelet, engraved with the initials "J.Y.A." José y Araceli. Her parents.
She said, "There are so many people who don't know what real love is."
It was time to say goodbye.
Next to the pews, cardboard boxes overflowed with packets of tissues and cases of bottled water to dab and douse the grief.
Araceli's sisters wailed and draped themselves over her pink coffin, as if they could hug her through the cold metal.
Cristal and Elena asked aloud why God would leave them alone: "Por qué nos deja solas?!" they cried. "Why did you do this to us?! Why did you take them away?!"
Karen sat behind them, staring at the three caskets in silence. She couldn't believe they held Mami, Papi, Gema and Chabelito.
But the waves of mourners, the hugs and offers of help made it more real. And there were the screams of her aunts, the tears on her uncles' cheeks.
The next morning, when the viewing resumed, the girls returned to do it all over again.
They listened to people say what a good friend, neighbor and worker their father was, how he'd do anything for his family. They heard Gema's friends and teachers talk about how mature and intelligent she was, how unfair it was they didn't get to see her grow up.
They tried to understand what people were saying about how this was just a temporary separation; that one day, they'd all be together again: The three girls and their five angels.
As funeral directors carried the caskets out - José first, then Araceli and José Emanuel, then Gema - Elena stared at a picture of her mother, propped in front of where her casket had been. She sobbed. "It's a punishment, Mami. I can't believe this."
She looked at her sister's casket. Tears streamed down her face.
"Why you leavin' me Gema?!
"Why you leavin' me?!"
Rice and beans, subs, chicken wings and drinks filled the community room at the York Spanish American Center - food donated by businesses and cooked by friends wanting to do what they could.
Elena surveyed the table of goodies, impressed.
"The only thing missing are hot Cheetos."
They were Gema's favorite.
She pulled old family portraits from a manila envelope her uncle brought. She remembered how much her father had saved to have those photographs done, how much her mother wanted to get a new one, with their little brother dressed in a suit.
Back at their uncle's house, people brought bunches of flowers and more candles to add to a makeshift altar set up in the living room. Photos of the deceased, glasses of water and apples were spread across a white tablecloth. Their dad's first job in America was picking apples, so each fall, he'd take his girls back to the orchards, and they would pick fruit together.
The altar is part of their culture's Catholic roots and rituals; the centerpiece of nine days of mourning and prayer after a death.
It encourages survivors to lean into their grief, the same way you'd lean into a loved one's embrace.
A week later, the plastic chairs had disappeared from Fidencio's living room. The candles sat, unlit, on the altar, and the only sound was the chirping of pet birds in their cages.
The family was still waiting to take the bodies to Mexico.
Fidencio nursed a headache. Valentina cleared food from the table.
The intensity of the past two weeks had taken a toll on her as well. She was tense and not sleeping well. The girls cry at night before they fall asleep, she explained, in Spanish. The mornings are difficult, too. Worst of all are the feelings of uselessness.
"It's one thing to say you love them and to want to help and support them," she said. "It's another thing to know what to do; how to console them when they're crying desperately."
A prayer group returned to Fidencio's house three days into the new year to dismantle the altar.
In absence of a cemetery, they took its contents to the girls' old house.
And so, after nightfall on a frigid January weekday, they filed through the few blocks separating the present and the past, the tiny flames of their candles flickering in a trail of sadness.
It was the first time Karen had been back to the house since the fire.
As others arranged the flowers and candles in front of the chain-link fence, she peered up through the hole in the porch awning. Without saying a word, she took in the gaping black window sockets, the pile of ash and shattered glass on the front porch.
Cristal rummaged under the front steps and pulled out wooden trays her father used to mix cement. She placed them in the back of her uncle's truck, along with her dad's tools.
"Pobrecita," said family friend Lupe Feeser. "Poor girl. She's looking for anything she can find cuz she's so sad."
The group shivered in the dark as Cristal scavenged for scraps of her former life.
"C'mon, chiquita," Feeser urged. "You ready, Cris?"
"I guess."
Slowly, Cristal turned away from the house.
Fidencio had been calling or stopping by the Etzweiler funeral home each day, asking if they could make their trip to Mexico yet.
Every day, the answer had been no. A holiday air cargo ban was still in place.
When they got word it was lifted, Fidencio and Araceli's sister Ana Desidirio Sixtos arranged to arrive in San José del Progreso in time to receive the coffins.
Fidencio appeared as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. Finally, the weeks of waiting were over.
He could take his relatives home.
Exactly four weeks after the fire, 5-year-old Gema Hernandez, the girls' cousin, awoke talking about having seen her cousins Gema and José Emanuel in her sleep. They were flying like angels, the little girl said, and her uncle José was with them, dressed in white.
Later that Saturday morning, in San José del Progreso, a van and truck arrived bearing the deceased members of the Hernandez family. In York, Karen, Cristal and Elena lounged in their aunt and uncle's bedroom, watching MTV to keep from thinking too much.
Karen predicted the viewings and funeral services in Mexico would be even larger than here: "Everybody knew my dad down there."
Just outside the Mexican village of El Faisan, in the house that José Hernandez had built for his new wife, where they lived before coming to the United States, friends, family members and neighbors came to pay their respects.
At 5 p.m., a priest celebrated Mass. It was morning before the last of the mourners went home.
Sunday, they held a Protestant service at Araceli's mother's house in nearby San José del Progreso.
When it was over, they led a long procession to the cemetery.
There, next to the plot where José's mother lies, they tucked five angels to rest, in a concrete vault hugged by Mexican soil.
Cristal planned to return to school on Monday. She wasn't sure she was ready to be away from her sisters, but friends kept asking when she'd be back, so she said she'd go.
"Walking home is gonna remind me of how much I want to go home," she told her sisters.
Elena: "One day, when you're not thinking, you might just go to the house."
Cristal: "They're gonna be asking me a lot of questions, and I'm gonna get mad."
Scenes from that night might be set on continuous play in her mind, but that doesn't mean she wants to share what she sees.
Her return to school lasted only for that day.
"It just didn't feel right," Cristal said. Not yet.
Karen said the only reason she seems calm is because she still can't accept what happened. "I feel normal, like this isn't real. I see that house and think I never lived there. I almost wish I could get angry so I could let some of this out."
Cable television, movies and visits from her boyfriend help distract her from her thoughts. She feels a responsibility to be strong for her sisters.
"I don't know what to tell them."
And she struggles with her faith.
"If I want to see my family again, I gotta believe something."
On June 28, 2006, probably while working on home renovations, José Hernandez took a green magic marker and scrawled a message on a square of chipboard. In case he died from the migraines, Karen explained. She and her sisters store it behind a desk for safekeeping.
The words read: "La familia es primero, no importa la distancia."
Family comes first, no matter the distance.
Now, his daughters lean on those words.
Elena said they help her believe the three of them will be OK.
Their guides will be five angels.
jvogelsong@ydr.com; 771-2034
The family/La familia
Age: 40
Work: CWork Solutions in Emigsville
Died from: Smoke inhalation
Age: 38
Work: United Foods in New Oxford
Died from: Smoke inhalation
Age: 19
Job: Did factory work through a temp company
Injuries: Burns on her hands and back
Age: 16
School: Junior at William Penn High
Injuries: Burn on her nose
Age: 14
School: Freshman at York Co. Tech
Injuries: Broke her foot
Age: 12
School: Eighth grade at Hannah Penn
Liked: Running
Died from: Smoke inhalation
Age: 1
Liked: SpongeBob, cars
Died from: Smoke inhalation
