Sometimes her life feels like one of those photos from the days before digital cameras, when images got bathed in trays of chemicals and came slowly into focus. Bertha Loaiza wants to see the whole picture. She has no memory of the day when she was 3 and her mother picked her up and stepped off the side of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. She may have been asleep. She survived the 240-foot fall into the water, but her mother didn't, and as Bertha recovered from serious eye and leg injuries, she got it into her head that a car accident was to blame. Kids have active imaginations, especially when the grownups don't say otherwise, and in the grandmother's house where she grew up, nobody talked about what really happened on Aug. 4, 1985. Then, when she was 17, she came across a VHS tape with news coverage of the suicide and the "miracle" child, the first person ever to plummet into the bay and live. "That looks like me," she said of the footage showing a little girl in a hospital bed surrounded by dolls, letters and stuffed animals sent by well-wishers from as far away as Mississippi. She watched the tape over and over, 100 times maybe, and put together the pieces. Her mother, 24-year-old Angelica Gomez, parking a green Ford Pinto mid-span on the bridge. Two fishermen pulling them out of the water. Doctors speculating that she survived because her mother held on to her all the way down and took the brunt of the impact. But finding out the truth only raised more questions, none more troubling than this: "Why did she take me with her?"
Sometimes her life feels like one of those photos from the days before digital cameras, when images got bathed in trays of chemicals and came slowly into focus.
Bertha Loaiza wants to see the whole picture.
She has no memory of the day when she was 3 and her mother picked her up and stepped off the side of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. She may have been asleep. She survived the 240-foot fall into the water, but her mother didn't, and as Bertha recovered from serious eye and leg injuries, she got it into her head that a car accident was to blame. Kids have active imaginations, especially when the grownups don't say otherwise, and in the grandmother's house where she grew up, nobody talked about what really happened on Aug. 4, 1985.
Then, when she was 17, she came across a VHS tape with news coverage of the suicide and the "miracle" child, the first person ever to plummet into the bay and live. "That looks like me," she said of the footage showing a little girl in a hospital bed surrounded by dolls, letters and stuffed animals sent by well-wishers from as far away as Mississippi.
She watched the tape over and over, 100 times maybe, and put together the pieces. Her mother, 24-year-old Angelica Gomez, parking a green Ford Pinto mid-span on the bridge. Two fishermen pulling them out of the water. Doctors speculating that she survived because her mother held on to her all the way down and took the brunt of the impact.
But finding out the truth only raised more questions, none more troubling than this: "Why did she take me with her?"