Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Ballplayer's kindness honors mother's heroics
By Ian O'Connor
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News
Put a boy in a ballpark, give him a uniform and a glove, and he might temporarily forget why he is so hurt, so confused, so ready to succumb to the hate filling the crevices of his broken heart. Introduce this kid to Cal Ripken Jr. and Derek Jeter, this American kid with roots in the shortstop assembly line known as the Dominican Republic, and he might briefly see the scattered jigsaw pieces of his world as a perfectly assembled scene.
“After all,” David Segui said, “every kid loves baseball.”
Actually, Kevin Villa loves dinosaurs and video games more. But this was Yankee Stadium, Ripken's last trip to Lou Gehrig's house, and Segui had come up with tickets, field passes and a few hours of refuge. You should know it was therapy for the 13-year veteran, too. A picture sheds a thousand tears, and after Segui saw this one he couldn't possibly let it go.
Kevin had been photographed for this newspaper by Stephen Schmitt, the shot showing an 8-year-old boy leaning on his mother's coffin, burying his tear-stained face in yellow rain-slicker sleeves as his grandmother comforted him from the rear. Segui thought the boy looked identical to his own son, Cory, and a father could go a lifetime without shaking that haunting thought.
“The reality of what Kevin had to deal with was so beyond whatever I could understand,” Segui said. “I had to do something for that kid.”
So Ripken would have to share one of his big days in the Bronx. Sept. 22. Kevin would sit at Ripken's locker, talk pitching with El Duque Hernandez, and tour the Yankee clubhouse with Jeter and Mike Mussina. Segui would give Kevin an Orioles uniform bearing the Villa name and Segui's number, 23. He would have a catch with Kevin, let him sit in the dugout, let him shag BP.
Segui would tell fans he'd only sign autographs if they asked for Kevin's autograph, too.
“This was the best day of my life,” Kevin would say on the way home.
It was 11 days after the worst. Eleven days after Kevin's mother was lost in a mass murder of unspeakable depths while showing a courage that would bring any big-league ballplayer to his knees.
Yamel Merino was a Mets fan who had ambulance duty at Yankee Stadium and Madison Square Garden. To know this woman is to know she was 16 the day her Kevin was born, and to understand she raised a young gentleman without the presence of his father, earned her equivalency diploma and found her calling: Yamel was born to be an EMT. The best in New York, according to the plaque she was too modest to hang.
Ana Jager, Yamel's mother, made sure to put it up herself, because how many parents of 24 year olds have heard so many stories about so much grace? Yamel didn't just load and deliver 90-year-old patients suffering from broken hips. She didn't just visit these complete strangers on her days off. She would grab her partner, Sande Santiago, and sing for them, using a hair brush as a mike.
The nurses would call her boss at MetroCare and ask if he realized what this woman with the killer Jim Carrey imitations was giving to people often forgotten by their own families. Yamel had never told Jim O'Connor because Yamel wasn't looking for a raise, just the next wound that needed to be healed.
The cases involving abused kids touched her the most, because Kevin was her everything. The last time Yamel spoke to her mother, the morning of Sept. 11th, she told Ana to give Kevin the lunch money she'd forgotten to leave. Ana heard the 911 dispatcher call “Fifteen George” — Yamel's ambulance — over the phone, an hour before the same call ordered Yamel to leave the Bronx and respond to the hell raging in the Lower Manhattan sky.
Yamel had just gotten her own apartment, her own car — man, she was proud of that '96 Forerunner. “I made it, I made it,” she told her mother. Life was so good. A few days before the 11th, Yamel and her sister, Gabriella, sat under a tree and talked into the small hours of night, the EMT going on and on about how she cherished her work.
Yamel did 50 push-ups every morning while training. She turned down a job offer from the Fire Department; a promotion to paramedic was on deck. “If she survived the 11th,” Gabriella said, “she would've been psyched to tell stories about all the good that people did down there.”
Others were left to tell those tales for her. Yamel was two months removed from her Disney World vacation with Kevin, the trip she'd saved and saved for, when she arrived at the World Trade Center with a male colleague, Cosmo Jackson, and heard the following charge:
One of you stay with the ambulance, one of you start working triage. Emergency vehicle or towering inferno? Guess which door Yamel Merino chose?
She was 5-4, maybe, and wore a size 4. “Pound-for-pound the smallest one down there,” O'Connor said, “and yet this little girl went stride for stride with all those burly firefighters and cops.” Twenty five years ago, O'Connor said, men would've never imagined sending a female EMT to a place half as apocalyptic as this.
Yamel was last seen helping a hysterical survivor before the first tower collapsed. Her body was found Sept. 12, 11 a.m. A call came in to MetroCare: There's a woman in one of your uniforms inside the temporary morgue. A supervisor confirmed the identification and told O'Connor, “Whatever you do, don't let her family come down here.”
MetroCare's casualty list read like this: 20 rescue workers hospitalized, nine ambulances destroyed, one life stolen. O'Connor drove off to see Yamel's parents, walked inside a home full of family members he'd never met, and waited for a question to pierce the dark silence, a question that wouldn't come. “Finally,” O'Connor recalled, “I just said, 'Unfortunately we found your daughter and she didn't escape.”'
They screamed at him, called him a liar, demanded that he take them to see her body. O'Connor asked for their trust and promised to bring back Yamel. She was taken to Sinatra Funeral Home in Yonkers, where they played “Amazing Grace” at her service. On Sept. 14, the youngest female rescue worker to die became one of the first heroes to be buried.
“I don't want a hero,” Yamel's mother said. “I want my daughter.”
Ana Jager was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. This wasn't any part of her American dream.
“Yamel's birthday is next month, and Kevin asked me, 'Who's going to help me blow out the candles?”' Ana said. “I told him, 'Your mother will help you.' Kevin tells me, 'I hate the people who did this to Mommy,' and I tell him, 'It's not good to hate people.' If we wish death on the terrorists we're acting just like them. I want them captured, but if we kill Osama bin Laden will that give me my daughter back?”
A daughter whose only crime in life, Gabriella said, “was being too kind, too forgiving and too loving.” Santiago used to tell Yamel, “Girl, you need to get a little evil in your bones.”
After the evil claimed Yamel, O'Connor drove to the Chappaqua home of Bill Clinton, got out, told the Secret Service guy that Kevin needed to hear about his mother's heroism from a powerful voice of the land. The letter arrived a few weeks later. Clinton told Kevin his mother was “a brave and loving person who dedicated her life to caring about others. You can always be proud that she was a true hero.”
A hero? Kevin already knew. “Yamel was everything to her son,” Gabriella said. This was a small woman who stood 110 stories tall in Kevin's world, a woman who would've smiled over the teacher's remark in Kevin's report card, the one that said he had a great work ethic. When Kevin explained he didn't understand the term, O'Connor told him his mother had a great work ethic. “Then I want that too,” the son said.
Kevin has Yamel's strength, always did. When his biological father resurfaced to claim primary custody, Kevin weathered a court case nobody needed. He's been able to draw pictures of planes crashing into the towers as part of his therapy. Kevin tries not to talk about his mother in front of his grandmother because he knows the reminders make Ana cry, but when he does ask why his mother had to die, Ana tells him, “God needed an angel.”
Yamel worked enough Yankee games to know you can't find any angels in the outfield or infield in baseball, just good hitters who sometimes come up bigger than Babe Ruth. When Segui invited Kevin to the Stadium, the boy told his grandmother, “I know they're doing this for Mommy.”
But doing anything for Yamel Merino was doing something for Kevin Villa, too. Yamel would've loved the way Segui and the others treated her boy. El Duque talked to him in Spanish, showed him some calisthenics. Mussina and Jeter helped him stuff his pockets with clubhouse candies. Segui played catch with him, made Gabriella and O'Connor cry, and made sure the Orioles had 26 men dressed in their dugout throughout the game.
“An older security guard told me that in all his years he'd never seen a ballplayer be so nice to a child,” O'Connor said. “That's why I didn't get crazy about the players possibly going on strike, because I knew there were guys out there like David.”
A guy who would decline all interview requests about Kevin and easy, behold-my-kindness publicity. A guy who would call Kevin's family over the holidays. A guy who would take his son on a post-game pilgrimage to Ground Zero this summer, when Cory searched the photos of the dead until he found the picture of Kevin's mom.
“I have two kids and I wonder if I would've had the courage to go in there, with those towers burning,” Segui said. “This was a mother who didn't hesitate to help strangers.”
Segui didn't hesitate to help a young stranger who's become his friend. The Orioles are back in town and Segui wants Kevin in the Stadium and on the field Thursday night.
The kid has to get through tomorrow first. Before Kevin Villa can consider revisiting his best day he has to make it through the anniversary of his worst day.
Sometimes even a uniform, a glove and a date with Derek Jeter can't offer a kid three hours of refuge from his forever-shattered heart.
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Ballplayer's kindness honors mother's heroics
