Season of Sharing helps after a devastating accident impacts large Arcadia family
Deisy Carranco reflects now on why things happened the way they did – on what set them on that long drive home in the dark.
That weekend in late October, Carranco, 34, was in Orlando with her husband and six kids to support two of her daughters in their cheerleading competitions. Everything was going so well – with the girls’ squads advancing to the finals.
As the family packed up to return home to Arcadia that evening – planning to come right back to Orlando the next day – Carranco remembered that organizers suggested that out-of-town families stay over. After all, it was easy to get lost in a new place, and accidents can happen late at night.
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But the household budget didn’t stretch. The money that she had planned to use for a hotel that weekend instead went to a big birthday party the week before for one of the girls, Gizel, turning 13. Given Carranco’s own troubled childhood, she was determined to celebrate her kids on their special days – to make sure that they were surrounded by cousins and loved ones.
So that night in Orlando, ahead of the two-hour drive, Carranco strapped the kids in the backseat of the Nissan Sentra – the boys, Jonathan Jr., 5, Nathaniel, 4, and Castiel, almost 16 months; along with Gizel and her sisters, Dylana, 17 and Cataleya, 7.
Though the Sentra was spacious, Carranco had wanted to use their roomier SUV for the day, but it had a broken tire. She would later wonder if the kids unbuckled seatbelts to get more comfortable.
Heading home on the open highway, with Casas behind the wheel and Carranco in the front passenger seat, she and the children dozed off.
Then sometime around 11 p.m. on U.S. 17 – just south of Wauchula and only about 15 minutes from their front door – a violent push shoved Carranco awake.
She couldn’t yet know of the drunk driver entering their path, or tell, in her shock, that the shove was the Sentra spinning, bouncing, and flipping several times, landing on its tires. Nor could she hear over the ringing in her ears. All she could see was the blurry figure of her husband on the road, screaming – gesturing wildly for her to get out.
When somehow she did, what entered her mind next was the searing image of the crumpled car before her – and the horrible thought of all her children trapped inside.
***
Carranco fought for years to give her kids a stable childhood – something she’d never had.
The daughter of migrant farmworkers from Mexico, she was brought up around Arcadia, laboring since the age of 8 with her family in the fields. At 10, she was placed in the foster care system and bounced between more than a dozen homes by the time she was 18.
Into her twenties, with permanent resident status, she had jobs in a daycare center and hospice, but mostly she worked in fast-food restaurants for its flexibility. By then she also was a single mother of three young girls, trying to make it on her own after several abusive relationships, one in which a controlling partner became physically violent when she attempted to attend classes for a GED.
Then, while living in Kansas in 2015, she met a man different from others she’d known.
“That’s when everything started changing,” she recalled.
Jonathan Casas was calm and mild-mannered, a hard worker who was generous and kind. The two understood each other, sharing stories of their troubled childhoods. He was great with her girls, and just as important, he treated her as someone special.
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“I’ve always felt with other relationships, unworthy or something,” she recalled. “But with him, it was never like that. I always felt like a somebody with him.”
The two married and eventually moved back to Florida in late 2018, their family growing with the births of their sons.
“I’ve always wanted a big family,” she said. “I guess it’s from me not having one growing up.” Casas felt the same way, by then a father figure to her girls, too. “He’ll do anything for us. There’s nothing he would not do for us.”
While Carranco took care of the kids and the home, Casas worked part of the year in well-paying welding jobs on the road – from Georgia and the Carolinas to Virginia and New York.
He was working out of town when the pandemic hit and Carranco, pregnant with their youngest, contracted COVID-19. For two weeks, she quarantined herself in one of the bedrooms of their three-bedroom trailer, making the kids close themselves off in another room when she came out to cook.
Casas was gone again when Carranco went into labor at 30 weeks in her sister’s car on the way to the hospital. Their youngest, Castiel, was born on the side of the road. After that, Carranco asked Casas to come back to search for jobs closer to home.
“I told him I can’t do this anymore by myself,” she said.
Carranco also found a bigger place for the couple and the six kids. It sat next to a recycling industrial site. Rent was $950 and she often had to take on repairs herself – fixing holes in the flooring, applying a vinegar solution to a termite infestation and getting two cats to attack the mice. But it had three bedrooms, a big yard and a front room where she could put the Christmas tree.
“I just wanted my kids to have their space,” she said.
The past year, Casas worked a good piping job while Carranco juggled shifts at a fast-food restaurant and a slaughterhouse.
Through the years she also signed the kids up for extra-curricular programs, to give them opportunities she’d never enjoyed. Dylana gravitated to soccer, Gizel and Cataleya to cheerleading. She checked out karate classes for the boys.
This past March, Carranco started attending a Pentecostal church – a move that would help her endure what came next.
***
Adrenaline pumped through Carranco’s system once the reality of the wreck kicked in.
Terrified that the car might ignite and oblivious to her own injuries, she and Casas raced to get the children out of the vehicle. A passing motorist – a man she’d later call her angel – had stopped to help. While he and Casas removed the boys, Carranco saw her oldest, Dylana, pinned inside, appearing to lapse into a seizure.
She wrestled with the crushed back passenger door to get to Dylana, but it wouldn’t budge.
“God, I need you to give me the strength,” she prayed. “I need to get my baby out of here.”
Somehow she was able to bend the door’s rim slightly and pull it back. Carranco reached in to feel Dylana’s back and sides to make sure she had not been impaled. The men rushed in behind her to lift Dylana and place her on the ground.
Now the boys were safe – though one with a fractured arm, another with a bruised face – and so was Cataleya. But there was no sign of Gizel, 13.
“Where is Gigi?” Carranco called to Casas, who’d already been trying to find her.
In the pitch blackness, Carranco heard a voice.
“Mommy, help me!”
Carranco felt her way, unable to see.
“Keep crying out to me!” she yelled to Gizel.
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Carranco came upon a ditch, jumped over it and walked straight into a barbed-wire fence. Gizel had been thrown from the Sentra and into a cow pasture. Carranco threw the weight of her body down on one spiked wire and yanked another one high over her head, creating enough space so that Casas could pull out Gizel, who suffered a sprained ankle.
Arriving paramedics tended to them all, sensing something was wrong with the youngest, Castiel, who at first had appeared unscathed.
The family split up – Carranco going by ambulance to a local hospital with the three middle children while Casas was flown by helicopter to Tampa General Hospital with the two oldest girls and Castiel, who was hemorrhaging internally from a lacerated liver.
In the month ahead – after lawyers got involved, and after the children’s nightmares subsided and physical wounds were on the mend – the accident took a toll in other ways.
Out of work for about two weeks, both Carranco and Casas found their positions filled when they were ready to go back to their jobs.
As the two scrambled to find other work and with no money coming in, the bills stacked up, turning a tight living situation into a crisis.
Their situation is all too common, said Sister Ann De Nicolo, the director of prevention support services in Arcadia for the Diocese of Venice’s Catholic Charities program.
“Most of the families are living paycheck to paycheck,” she said, noting that the area needs more well-paying jobs and training programs.
De Nicolo was able to help Carranco and her family through Season of Sharing – paying almost $1,400 total, including December’s rent as well as payments on the couple’s car insurance. Through other funding sources, she also helped them pay two months of their electric bills.
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The help was enough to get them caught up just in time for Casas’ good news in mid-December. His employer was ready to take him back.
Meanwhile, though Carranco still suffers from severe neck pain from the accident, she is hoping to start soon at a nearby daycare center.
The accident has caused her to take stock of her life, deepening her faith in God.
Carranco feels grateful, thinking the outcome would have been worse if they’d been in the SUV, whose gas tank sits on the side where the impact occurred.
“We would have never made it out,” she said. “I know through the grace of God that was God protecting us.”
She also counts De Nicolo among her blessings.
“If it wasn’t for Sister Ann helping us, I don’t know where we’d be right now.” And then there was the mysterious stranger who stopped that night – her angel – who disappeared after assisting the family and whose name she still doesn’t know.
Carranco remains fearful when driving the SUV, panicking if cars get too close.
“We can recover from injuries. I know it’s going to be a process to recover from the trauma,” she said.
They’re still awaiting a settlement on the wreck, hoping it will help them replace the badly needed second vehicle.
For now, she is relishing time with her kids, determined to find meaning in what happened and why they were on that path that night – convinced that God is giving her a new lease on life
“God gave me a chance to restart everything and do it right this time,” she says.
Bouncing the baby in her lap, as she started to talk about the fragility of life and how it can pass in the blink of an eye, she stopped, breaking down and beginning to cry.
“Even though we’re struggling, he’s provided for us,” she said about God. “I can see my kids. I can see my husband.”
Now that Casas is going back to work, she is thinking ahead for herself, to get her GED, to further her education in order to become a teacher’s assistant or a CNA.
God has big plans for her family, she believes, even if she doesn’t yet know what they are.
“There’s a reason we’re still here,” she said, “and I’m going to seek it.”
How to help
Season of Sharing was created 21 years ago as a partnership between the Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County to get emergency funds to individuals and families on the brink of homelessness in Sarasota, Manatee, Charlotte and DeSoto counties. There are no administrative fees and no red tape – every dollar donated goes to families in need to help with rental assistance, utility bills, child care and other expenses.
Donations to Season of Sharing may be made online at cfsarasota.org/donors/support-season-of-sharing, or by sending a check (payable to the Community Foundation of Sarasota County) to Attn. Season of Sharing, 2635 Fruitville Road, Sarasota, FL 34237. Contact the foundation at 941-955-3000 for more information or to request a credit card form. All donations are tax-deductible.
This story comes from a partnership between the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County. Saundra Amrhein covers the Season of Sharing campaign, along with issues surrounding housing, utilities, child care and transportation in the area. She can be reached at samrhein@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Season of Sharing helps after accident impacts large Arcadia family
