No miracle came. Sonja's parents signed the required forms. By now, family friends had gathered in the ICU, and they joined Carolyn and Van to form a circle around Sonja when the machines were turned off. Carolyn told Sonja's spirit, "You have permission to go." They chanted an ancient blessing in Sanskrit, and Carolyn sang a Native American lullaby. Sonja's heartbeat quickly dropped to thirty beats per minute, then to nothing.
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer would not continue after all.
Little girl lost: Sonja DeVries was a sunny infant.
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"We weren't hysterical; we were in shock," says Carolyn. "It was like our minds had been blown apart."
Sonja was a registered organ donor, and the doctors whisked away her mortal shell to harvest her corneas and bone marrow for transplant. Her internal organs had suffered too much damage to be of use.
The death of Sonja DeVries and the charging of Ramon Romero with vehicular homicide was noted in one-paragraph items in both the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News.
Channel 4 took more of an interest.
Three days after Sonja died, Emmy Award-winning reporter Kathy Walsh contacted Van and Carolyn. On July 21, Walsh and a camera crew went to their house and filmed an interview for a three-minute story that ran a few hours later on KCNC's 6 p.m. newscast. At the end of the segment, the anchorman announced, "Romero is a KCNC-TV employee. He was not on duty at the time of the accident."
According to court records, Romero had worked as a technical engineer at KCNC since at least 1996. "She didn't mention that Romero worked for them," Carolyn says of Walsh.
Romero resigned from Channel 4 shortly after the newscast.
"His being an employee did not affect the decision to cover the news," says KCNC spokeswoman Danielle Dascalos.
The assistant Denver DA assigned to Romero's case has met twice with Van and Carolyn DeVries and has asked them to decide whether they want him prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law or offered another plea bargain. If he is tried and convicted of vehicular homicide, he would likely be sentenced to prison for 24 years and be eligible for parole in twelve.
Through his longtime attorney, Normando Pacheco, who has brokered plea bargains for his client in the past, Romero has indicated his willingness to plead guilty to vehicular assault in exchange for a sentence of twelve years, out in six.
Neither possibility gives Sonja's parents much consolation.
"The only good I see that putting him in prison for as long as possible would do is preventing him from killing anyone else," says Carolyn. "I don't want revenge. I want to watch my daughter go to college and have a child. I want to see what great things she would have done with her life. I want to see what she would have done with her unlimited potential. Putting this man in prison doesn't give me that. It's too late."
Romero and Pacheco both declined to be interviewed.
Romero showed up for an August 25 preliminary hearing dressed in a sharp gray suit. He said nothing while the prosecutor and his attorney went through the formality of delaying his next hearing until early October. While Pacheco conferred with a court clerk, Romero retreated to a rear corner of the courtroom. When a reporter approached, he said, "No, no, I can't talk to you." The reporter pushed a photo of Sonja DeVries into Romero's line of sight. He recoiled and began to cry.
"I'm sorry," he said. "This never should have happened."
Last month, a silver plaque was installed on the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's Sky Terrace. It bears a shooting star graphic and the message "Sonja DeVries, Heaven's New Star."
