ELKHART, Ind. (AP) — For her whole life, Da’jeianna Smith had a sharp tongue and a fiery spirit. But — more than she’ll ever know — her heart was always in the right place.
As a mother of four, Valerie Sinclair could rely on Da’jeianna — her second child — to be her backup. When her two youngest children were babies, Da’jeianna would make sure she packed the diaper bag. When Sinclair gave her children specific instructions, Da’jeianna made sure her siblings didn’t forget it. She was her “echo,” Sinclair said.
And she was never one to bite her tongue, either. From a young age, Sinclair had to tell Da’jeianna that she couldn’t say everything that was on her mind. But Da’jeianna wasn’t a bully. She’d stand up to people who were picking on others, even if they were twice her size.
“She just wasn’t scared of anything or anybody,” Sinclair told The Elkhart Truth (https://bit.ly/10QLte9 ). “She was like a bully of bullies.”
On the clear afternoon of May 16, 2012, Da’jeianna finished her chores and her homework, then walked down C.R. 108, turning onto C.R. 3 to play with her friends at Woodland Elementary School.
Sinclair was heading home when she got a call from her husband. An accident involving a little girl had closed off C.R. 108, he said.
Call it a mother’s intuition. Sinclair knew before she was told.
“It was almost like an immediate feeling,” Sinclair said. “It was almost like I knew it was her.”
Norman Yeakey, 56, did not see Da’jeianna walking along the side of the road, according to an incident report from the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Department. A witness driving behind Yeakey’s pickup said Yeakey suddenly veered off the side of the road, hitting Da’jeianna from behind. He realized he hit something and stopped his vehicle after he heard people shouting at him, according to the report.
Documents say Yeakey wasn’t on any drugs or alcohol. Police later told Sinclair that Yeakey had been working long hours and was just tired. No action was taken against him.
Da’jeianna was only a fifth of a mile from home.
She suffered head and chest trauma and was taken to Memorial Hospital of South Bend. She was later pronounced brain dead.
But last month, Sinclair got to hear Da’jeianna’s heart beat again.
In early 2012, nearly 500 miles from the hospital where Da’jeianna would die, a Pennsylvania boy’s life was reaching a critical moment.
Starting only four days after he was born in 1997, Dalton Igoe of Altoona, Pennsylvania, was diagnosed with six congenital heart diseases. By the time he was 5, he’d survived four open-heart surgeries —barely. After the third surgery, blood clots went into his left lung, and he almost died. The lung is still there, but his mother, Dawn Igoe, said it “doesn’t really work.”
When he was 10, doctors told him he had developed a deadly condition called “protein-losing enteropathy,” which starves the body of necessary proteins and albumin. By 2012, it worsened.
Dalton needed a new heart, the doctors said.
“When he was younger, as a baby on all these blood thinners — you know, you’re learning to walk and crawl — we had to watch him real closely because when you’re on blood thinners, you could have internal bleeding,” Dawn said.
He couldn’t run track, shoot basketball or pitch a baseball. Dalton’s heart condition left him vulnerable while doing almost anything other little kids don’t have to think twice about, Dawn said.
Dalton was put on the heart transplant list on May 8, 2012. He and his family were told it could take months — maybe years — before a match would be found. Dalton couldn’t get just any heart, either. Though well into his teens, Dalton stood only 4 feet, 2 inches tall, weighing between 55 and 60 pounds. He needed a small heart. A child’s heart.
But just 10 days later, Dawn got a phone call.
“When your child is so sick and you know they need an organ to save their life, it’s the best call you ever get in your life,” Dawn said.
Hours after she was hit, Da’jeianna’s body began to shut down. Doctors conducted a brainwave scan on her to see if she had any brain activity and none was detected.
Sinclair was given the choice to donate Da’jeianna’s organs during a visit from representatives of the Indiana Organ Procurement Organization. Sinclair had always been a registered organ donor, but of course never imagined she would have to make that decision for one of her children.
Sinclair recalled looking into her daughter’s eyes and knowing Da’jeianna’s “soul had left her body.” She made her decision.
“They gave me one-on-one time with her,” Sinclair said of her last moments with her daughter. “And I made the decision for me to leave first instead of watching her be taken away.”
The doctors came to get Da’jeianna around midnight. She died on May 17, 2012.
After Dalton received Da’jeianna’s heart, his mother Dawn wanted to write letters to Sinclair and her family but didn’t. The organization that found Dalton a heart — the Center for Organ Recovery & Education — told her that donor families often do not react well to contact from a recipient so soon after the death of a loved one. They told Dawn to wait a year before contacting them, and she did.
And when Dalton went to the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for an appointment on Jan. 2, 2014, there was a letter waiting for him.
It was from Sinclair.
She introduced herself and Da’jeianna, going back to how Da’jeianna lost her life two years ago. In return, Dalton’s mother, Dawn, sent pictures of Dalton before and after he received Da’jeianna’s heart.
“I wanted to show our donor family the new life they had given Dalton,” Dawn said. “He was dying and sick and did not have quality of life. And that heart gave him everything he missed for 15 years.”
Since then, Sinclair and her three children have kept in touch with the Igoes through phone conversations and letters. Until about a month ago, the two families had never met. But when Sinclair first laid eyes on Dalton at a CORE conference Oct. 20 at the Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh, she immediately walked toward him and hugged him.
Dalton wasn’t a small, sickly boy anymore. In the first year following the transplant, he grew eight-and-a-half inches and gained nearly 70 pounds.
During their meeting, Dalton pulled out his stethoscope, which he received while helping out with the nonprofit Altoona Mobile Emergency Department (AMED).
He offered the headset to Sinclair and placed the chest piece on his ribcage. Sinclair heard Da’jeianna’s heartbeat.
Today, it’s not just her heart that lives on in Dalton.
After the surgery, Dalton suddenly wanted to drink coffee and eat candy — things he had never liked before, but Da’jeianna did.
Da’jeianna’s fiery spirit has apparently passed onto Dalton, too. His mother believes it’s where Dalton’s new attitude comes from.
He’s even starting to get curls just like Da’jeianna, Dawn said.
Sinclair still sees her daughter every day. She has a tattoo of Da’jeianna on her right shoulder so she can see her every time she looks in the mirror. Sinclair still hears her daughter’s voice in the back of her head whenever she sees a cute toy while out shopping. She never visits her grave without bringing a gift.
Sinclair remained calm as she talked about the day her daughter died, until she spoke of the man who hit her.
Sinclair said she knows accidents happen. A million things could have gone differently. But that’s not what eats away at her.
“The one thing that really, really bothers me is that the guy that hit my daughter,” Sinclair said as her voice broke. “I never even got an apology.”
Attempts by The Elkhart Truth to speak to Yeakey directly were unsuccessful, but his stepdaughter, Sabrina LaClair, said the incident has devastated him. Ever since the incident two years ago, Yeakey stopped driving.
“He is just really sorry for it happening,” she said during a phone conversation. “He has grandchildren of his own. It’s tearing him up.”
But the absence of Yeakey from Da’jeianna’s short but vibrant story has left Sinclair disquieted.
Sinclair has driven to what she believed was Yeakey’s house twice, but never worked up the nerve to go to the front door. She didn’t know what she would say. Instead, she stayed in her car and wept before turning home.
Last summer, she started to write a letter to him. She said she wanted Yeakey to know what he took from her.
But after writing four pages, Sinclair stopped and still hasn’t finished it.
“I really hope that one day he reaches out to me and says something,” she said. “I’ve been to the point where it’s like, gosh, should I go knock on his door just to say, ‘Could you just tell me sorry?’”
Sinclair now lives with her mother and three other children in northwest Goshen. Her white pickup has a picture of Da’jeianna with angel wings on the back window. In Sinclair’s living room, pictures of her daughter line every inch of the far wall.
“After a while, you just get to a point where you don’t want to forget,” she said. “You want the memories to be fresh. You want it to constantly be a remembrance. You know, that’s how I feel. I don’t ever want her to fade away.”
She walks up to the mantle in her living room, which is decorated with porcelain angels, flowers and even more pictures of Da’jeianna. She picks through the mementos of her daughter’s life before holding up a cast of a small brown hand with painted fingernails.
It’s a mold of Da’jeianna’s hand that was made while she was in the hospital. The wrist is covered with bracelets, each of them of different shapes and colors. Da’jeianna wore some of them while she was still alive and her siblings have made some others for her since her death.
Sinclair touched one of bracelets she gave her daughter — a silver one with a special inscription.
“A daughter is a special gift,” she reads. “A blessing from above. The joy and friendship never ends and not least of all the love.”
She thinks back on the times when it was just the two of them together, doing simple things like shopping, singing songs or “just doing girl stuff.”
“She told me one time, ‘Sometimes, I might have a bad attitude, but I got a good heart,’” Sinclair said.
Sinclair knew it was true then, and she knows it’s still true now. Da’jeianna’s heart was always in the right place.
And it still is.
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Information from: The Elkhart Truth, https://www.elkharttruth.com
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