A brief peace, a life cut short

She escaped the burning towers on Sept. 11, 2001, but so many of her friends did not. After years of torment, healing came at last — in the form of a tiny baby girl. Now it is her family that is left to heal.

By Dan DeWitt, Times Staff Writer
Published October 12, 2007

	Sonia Vidal cuddles with her new granddaughter, Mariah Torres, who was born on Aug. 31.
[Family photo]

ADVERTISEMENT Sept. 11, 2002 Memories of terror that remain fresh [Times photo: Ron Thompson] Sonia Vidal's son, William Torres, 23, remembers his mother as the person who stood by him. "I don't know what I'm going to do without my mother," he said. "I loved her so, so, so much." [Times photo: Ron Thompson] A basket of baby items still rests on a bed in Sonia Vidal's home.

SPRING HILL -- Sonia Vidal was through dwelling on the memories -- the panicked dash down the stairs, the plane hitting the tower, the friends she had lost.

She wasn't going to slide into depression when 9/11 came around this year. She wanted to celebrate her son's birthday, on Sept. 15, which she had let pass unnoticed since 2001. She would take joy in caring for her premature granddaughter, whom she visited in the hospital every day.

"I've been blessed by my son having a little baby girl just a few days ago," Vidal told the WFUS-FM 103.5 radio station in Tampa on the morning of Sept. 11.

"For the first time in six years, I'm actually happy -- 46 years old and I still got it going on."

"Good job, Grandma," said Skip Mahaffey, the disc jockey, who knew Vidal as a regular caller. "You hug both those babies, yours and his."

She never got a chance to throw her son a birthday party and had only four more days to dote on her granddaughter. And, as Vidal once did, her friends and family are trying to find their way after an incomprehensible tragedy.

"I don't know what I'm going to do without my mother," said her son, William Torres, 23. "I loved her so, so, so, so much."

Vidal, a computer consultant for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was riding an elevator in the north tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane struck.

"It felt like the building was going to crack in half," she said in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times on the first anniversary of 9/11.

She saw the second plane hit as soon as she walked out on the street. In the exodus from downtown, she was showered with dust and repeatedly knocked to the sidewalk. By the time she escaped to Queens, where her oldest sister worked, she was barefoot, bruised and terrified.

"I don't think Webster's has come up with a word to describe what people were feeling that day," she said. "There was so much, the combination of fear and loneliness and abandonment and anger."

The next few weeks were almost as harrowing -- harder for her than many of her colleagues because she had worked throughout the Port Authority and made friends in nearly every office.

"My whole life revolved around the fact that I knew so many people who didn't make it," she said. "I spent so much time at memorials and crying that I thought the tears would dry up. But they didn't. It just got worse and worse."

She moved to Spring Hill at the end of 2001 after visiting a friend and being amazed to hear songbirds rather than traffic when she woke up in the morning.

It took a while, but Florida began to heal her. She developed a love for the beach, which didn't surprise her friends, and for country music, which did.

"I called her my Puerto Rican redneck," said Vickie Curatola, her best friend in Florida.

Even better, Curatola and Torres said, they began to see signs of the old Sonia: hardworking, outgoing, a great friend and mother.

She earned an associate's degree in criminal justice at Florida Metropolitan University in Tampa in 2003. Vidal, who also had a bachelor's degree in computer science, was told she was too old to use her skills to help the Central Intelligence Agency catch terrorists, as she had hoped. But she did land a job with the computer support contractor for the JP Morgan Chase financial firm in Tampa.

On Sunday mornings she read Scripture as a lector at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church in Spring Hill. Sunday afternoons, she rooted fanatically for her adopted football team, the St. Louis Rams.

She liked to seat her friends at the kitchen counter and host a mock television show, serving them plates of tempura shrimp or Tuscan chicken.

"Instead of Emeril Live she called it Sonia Live," Torres said.

If Curatola was a few minutes late meeting her friend at the beach, Vidal would have a crowd of new acquaintances to introduce to her. At country music bars, Vidal pulled reluctant dance partners away from their tables.

"She was so friendly it could be embarrassing sometimes," said Curatola, 52.

Once, when Curatola needed to talk to Vidal about a family problem, Vidal listened on the phone for two hours.

"Then she said, 'Forget this, I'm going to come over and give you a hug.' And with Sonia, you couldn't give her a little hug. She said, 'I need a real hug.' "

Torres knows he made his mother's recovery harder, starting with their fights over moving to Florida.

"I was 17 years old. I was stubborn and stupid and I hated it down here," he said.

He ruined her auto insurance by piling up traffic offenses and totalling her car. He has been arrested 10 times in the past three years, most recently on Sept. 2, two days after his fiancee, Tina Hall, gave birth to their daughter, Mariah. Their baby arrived three weeks early, delivered by emergency caesarean section and running a high fever. But she weighed a relatively robust 5 pounds 4 ounces, and doctors said her long-term prognosis was excellent.

"She's perfect," said Torres, who was arrested at the hospital on charges including violating his probation and driving with a suspended license.

This was all the more frustrating, he said, because he has tried to change his life since he started living with Hall, 20, a year ago. They rented a three-bedroom house in Hudson with money they made from selling clothes and office supply products on the Internet. He was devoted to Hall and his baby.

Vidal, who raised Torres as a single mother, said she believed all this when he called from jail a few nights after his arrest.

"She told me, 'I promise you, even if you're in there 10 years, your baby will be here for you. Your fiancee will be here for you. And everything will be taken care of.' "

She also told him she was in love.

"I said, 'Ma, What are you talking about?' She said, 'William, I'm in love with that baby you made.'"

So in love -- and so busy -- she escaped the sadness that usually descended on her this time of year.

She paid her son's rent and let Hall stay in her duplex in Spring Hill so she didn't have to sleep alone in the isolated house in Hudson. Vidal called Hall to check on the baby every day during her morning breaks and at lunch. After work, she drove directly to the hospital in Spring Hill to feed Mariah a bottle of formula and change her diapers.

She also visited her granddaughter on Saturday mornings, including on Sept. 15, her son's birthday. She left the hospital about 11, and about an hour later, set off to pay her electric bill, driving west on a two-lane highway in Hernando County.

A truck pulling a trailer piled high with lumber was traveling east, according to Hernando County Sheriff's office spokeswoman Donna Black. The trailer broke free and drifted into the opposite lane. Its hitch pierced the windshield of Vidal's Pontiac and struck her in the head.

Though Vidal's brain function ceased immediately, Torres said, doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa kept her alive for two days until he was released from jail and gave permission to turn off her life support.

Her death seemed especially cruel, because she was so full of plans for her granddaughter.

She dreamed of setting her up in a high chair in the kitchen and teaching her to cook, Torres said as he and Hall began to clean out his mother's home two weeks after her death. Pink onesies she had bought for Mariah hung in the closet. A basket of gift-wrapped outfits, baby blankets and a teddy bear rested on her bed.

"If you're looking for a justification, there is no justification because she was such a super person. She was an angel," Curatola said.

For consolation, Torres can only look at what she left behind, a legacy of love and strength. Torres will be a better father, he said, because he witnessed the way she cared for Mariah. He will survive her death because he saw his mother persevere after 9/11, never giving in to hate or losing hope.

"That's how I'm getting through this. ... I'm just following her example," he said. "Every day, I'm trying to do everything the way I think she would do it."

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Dan DeWitt can be reached at dewitt@sptimes.com or (352) 754-6116.

[Last modified October 12, 2007, 10:26:18]