|
Janessa
Michaela Horner
June
27, 1996 – May 28, 2000
Janessa’s
Stats:
Favorite Song:
“Man I Feel Like a Woman!”
by Shania Twain
Favorite Story:
“The Big, Best Snowman”
Favorite
Pre-school song: “Way Up
High in the Apple Tree”
Favorite Hymn:
“Jesus Loves Me”
Favorite Foods:
Waffles, Spaghetti, watermelon and of course Happy Meals
Favorite Candy:
Kit Kat Bars
Favorite
Drinks: Strawberry milk,
chocolate milk, and hot chocolate with whip cream!
Favorite
Desserts: Cake & Oreo
Cookies
Favorite Color:
Purple
Favorite
Flower: Pansies
Favorite Plant:
Bleeding Heart
Favorite
Holiday: Christmas (But
pretty much loved them all!)
Favorite things
to do: Paint, sing, color,
dance, play with her friends and little sister, take long baths,
sledding, swimming, and loved to dig in the dirt or the sand.
Favorite Places
to go: Library, pre-school,
the fair, the mall, the park, McDonald’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Planet Kid,
Discovery Center, Boys & Girls Club, Children’s Museums, the
mountains and the beach.
Favorite Games:
Go Fish, Mouse Trap, and puzzles
Nick Names:
Nessie, Nessa, & Little Bear
Janessa’s
Story
Janessa
was born on Thursday, June 27, 1996 at 5:10 pm to Julie Fikstad (Horner)
and Matthew Cunningham. She
was born 7 weeks premature and delivered cesarean section, along with a
$26,000 dollar hospital bill. She
suffered from Apnea spells at first, but was found to be a healthy baby
who could survive. Two
weeks later she came home. Janessa
and I moved in with my parent’s shortly after she was born.
Her biological dad and I were living together but had not put our
problems behind us enough to work it out for the baby.
We didn’t want to get married for the wrong reasons and figured
it would just eventually work itself out.
So, my parent’s helped raise her for the first year of her
life. She filled a void in
their heart with pure joy. They
had an empty spot because they lost their son four years before Janessa
was born, to suicide. I
too felt this love for her like no other love I had felt on this Earth.
I prayed and prayed that God would just let her live for a little
while. And He did just
that…I am forever grateful for the years I did have her for. She gave me life, like oxygen.
She was what I lived for, dreamed for, and she was my
life.
Janessa lived on to be a
chubby healthy baby. She
was very smart and never seemed hindered by being premature.
Later she went on to have tubes put in her ears and dental work
done on her teeth. Both of
these surgeries required anesthesia. She recovered and made it through both surgeries.
When Janessa was 8 months
old, I started dating her adopted dad, Virgil Horner.
Janessa liked him a lot when she was a baby.
At that age she didn’t like very many males, except for her
Grampie. So, I was very
impressed by this. Later,
we both started going to church together, and gave our lives to Jesus.
We then, married three months later.
We raised Janessa in a Christian home environment, put her in a
Christian pre-school, and read her bible stories almost every night.
She was dedicated to the Lord with her little sister, Hannah.
Janessa was two years old then, and received her first little
pink New Testament bible. She
loved that bible! At two
years old, she also learned to pray.
Janessa lived on to be a
sweet little girl. Who
loved all animals and made friends easily.
She loved nature and she had an incredible zest for life.
It’s no wonder she always wanted to do everything “now” and
be on center stage because she knew her time on this Earth would run
out. To know her, was to
love her, by all who knew her. She
had it all brains, beauty and personality!
She also was a very assertive, yet a pleasant mannered little
girl. We always joked that
she would be first woman president.
She enjoyed being a big
sister. She was very
protective of her little sister, Hannah.
She was always so funny about the sibling spats they would get
into. One time she hit
Hannah on the head, and her dad asked her “Did you just hit Hannah?”
and she replied, “No I didn’t hit her, I just spanked her on the
head!” She was very
creative. She named our cat
“Hockey”. And the day
that she died she picked a purple pansy from the neighbor’s flowerbed
and named it “Tickle”. She
was always doing things that were original.
She was also very proud to be a “Mommy’s helper”.
She always tried hard to please us, even though she was the
typical kid who hated to clean her room.
But dishes, laundry, vacuuming, and other chores were always fun
to her. She enjoyed helping
others and she never looked down on people.
She was everyone’s friend no matter who they were.
She was a good example to all of us.
She amazed us at how well she
understood Jesus and death. When
she was just two and a half she went to church on an Easter Sunday.
She came out of her class after the service and exclaimed
“Mommy, Jesus died, and he had owes, but he came back to life!”
Then, one time my mother took Janessa out to the cemetery
with her to take her son some flowers.
Janessa asked my mom what happened to him, and my mother told her
that he died. She said
“Oh, the poor thing.” with such sorrow.
It was truly amazing that she understood all of this at such a
young age.
Once her daddy asked her how
she got into mommy’s tummy and she replied “Jesus put me in
there.” She always was
very close to God. She died
3 days before her dad’s birthday and she wanted to make him cookies so
badly. I told her she had
to wait a few days, that it wasn’t his birthday yet.
She was so upset that we didn’t make cookies, almost as if she
knew that she wouldn’t be here to make those cookies for her daddy.
Then, the night before she died I had come down with the stomach
flu or dehydration from being out in the sun most of the day.
When my husband came home that evening, he had asked me what was
wrong, and I replied, “I just feel really yucky and weak.”
Janessa looked up at me and said, “You are weak, Mommy, but HE
is strong!” Again, she
was sending me a message. Later
that evening my husband had asked her if she accepted Jesus as her
savior and she said, “Yes.” without any hesitation.
On the day that she died, just one month from being four years
old; she came out of Sunday school class at church with a paper that
said “God Loves Us!” She
said, “Look Mommy, God loves us!”
She said it with so much excitement.
It didn’t read God loves me, it said us.
This too was another message from her.
Even though we were about to encounter the biggest tragedy of
life ever, God still loves us! Janessa
always told her daddy that she was going to have angel wings someday.
And her daddy would say, “I don’t know, Nessie.
Maybe?” She always
replied, “I will daddy, I will.”
It was a warm spring Sunday,
on May 28th, Memorial Day Weekend in fact, when my husband
and I had gotten the girls ready and headed off for church.
It was just two days before Janessa’s pre-school graduation.
We came home and had lunch, and laid Hannah down for her nap.
After Hannah’s nap we decided to go to the new Disney Dinosaur
movie. This was the first
movie that Hannah and Janessa got to go see together.
Hannah was only 21 months at the time.
They had so much fun, sharing their gummy bears and popcorn.
They both had to share a seat; they didn’t weigh enough to keep
the seat from flipping back up by themselves.
So,
we left and decided to go to our local Home Depot store that had just
opened last April. We had
bought a home that was built in 1953 and needed quite a bit of updating.
So, we decided we would go in there and get some ideas for the
house and pick up a few things for the garden.
Only, it didn’t happen that way at all.
We went to the Home Depot, I can still see us pulling in on the
East side of the parking lot, and getting the girls out of the van.
Janessa jumped in my arms and I carried her like the little baby
that she will always be to me in my heart.
Virgil had Hannah and we proceeded into the store.
Janessa was almost four years old, and we had taught her that as
long as she was good and stayed right by us that she didn’t have to
ride in the cart. She
learned that she was to hold onto the side of the cart when we asked her
to stay right beside us. We
started to go through the store looking at kitchen cabinets, sinks, and
faucets. Then, we proceeded
down an aisle where all the screen doors were.
We were talking about which one we would like to buy down the
road and which style and color. Then,
we came to the end of the aisle and we went to turn down the next aisle.
There was a male employee and a female customer standing in the
aisle that we were trying to go down.
She had a long bed cart, and on the other side was a display of
some sort. We noticed she
was waiting for a forklift to get down some kind of lumber for her.
She came over to us and replied that she would be out of our way
in just a minute. Then, we
waited for about 45 seconds, watching the forks go under the lumber. Then,
he went in a second time and proceeded to bring down the lumber.
We saw the lumber start to slide our direction, but we thought
that we were far enough away. We
were standing a good 15-20 feet outside of the yellow tape barricade.
Once the lumber started hitting the floor and crashing into
echoes that will never leave my memory, we started to move the girls out
of the way. I grabbed onto
the cart where Hannah was sitting and started to pull her back.
Janessa was standing next to the cart and was just getting ready
to run towards me as I was coming towards her.
Then, before I knew it pieces of 6-12 foot lumber we’re flying
through the air end over end. Two
or more of the pieces hit the back of Janessa and crushed her into the
concrete floor. I knelt
down to pull the pieces off of her and at the same time Hannah was
tipped over in her cart from the lumber sliding on the floor and hitting
the wheels of the cart. Virgil
went to get Hannah while I was pulling the pieces of lumber off of
Janessa. I grabbed her
bruised little body and screamed “Janessa!” realizing she was
unconscious.
I laid her down on the floor,
too scared to check for pulse or breathing.
She was already bruised all over her body, her face, and one eye
swollen purple. I stood up
and started pacing and screaming “My baby!”
I had just gotten CPR certified for my job last January and I was
in such a state of shock and panic that I was too scared to help her.
I just freaked out thinking what if I send her into cardiac
arrest and make it worse. Luckily,
some of the employees in the store knew CPR and began to recessitate
her. She was breathing very
shallow and had a pulse. Everyone
in the store kept reassuring me that she was going to be ok.
But, I knew that she wasn’t.
I just could feel that her spirit had already left this world.
It felt like hours before the
ambulance got there and when it did, they wouldn’t let me ride with
her. So, an employee
offered to drive us to the hospital since we were in such a state of
shock. We arrived at our
local hospital and I started making all the phone calls to the
grandparent’s. The
doctors let us in to see her for a minute, and then put us back in the
waiting room. Some of the
doctors and nurses came in the room, all looking devastated.
They said well, “Kids are resilient, and she might make it
through this.” They
wanted to have her life flighted to another hospital to see if they
could run some tests on her brain and if there was anything they could
do, it would be better to do the surgery there.
I knew that there was probably not a thing they could do for her.
I’d seen brain damage all too well before when my brother died
of a gun shot wound to the head 8 years earlier.
Still, I had hope…
Again, we could not go with
her, so we had to drive a very long two hours to the other hospital.
She went into cardiac arrest on the helicopter, but they revived
her and she made it to St. Alphonsaus Medical Center.
When we got there, they had already done the cat scans and had
her in ICU. A doctor came
in and put a serum in her eyes and ears to see if the brain responded.
But it didn’t. A
couple of 100 lb counter tops had hit her in the back of the head,
splitting a main vein in her brain.
She was bleeding severely in her little head.
They had us go to another
waiting room area. The
doctor came in and said “She is brain dead, there is nothing or anyone
else can do for her.” I
stared so deeply into her eyes thinking, “God can, God please, you
can!” Then she replied
with some hope, “But there is one thing you can do, and that is to
donate her organs.” Virgil
and I discussed it, and we knew it was the right thing to do.
If we were the parent’s or family praying and wishing
so badly that someone could help our loved one survive, we would want
this for them. So, we did
it. I am so glad that we
did it now. They couldn’t
salvage her heart from all the damage that was done to it, but she
helped out with the eyes, kidneys, heart valves, and such.
Six people benefited from her precious life.
We receive letters often about who she has helped and what a
difference it made. Those
letters help pick me up on a bad day.
Her hospital bill was roughly around another $26,000 dollars.
It’s very ironic that it cost just as much to give her life, as
it did to take it away.
The next morning I dreaded
calling her biological dad. I
couldn’t believe I had to tell him that his only little girl was dead.
He lives 12 hours away, and we had just visited him last
November. Janessa never
questioned why she had two daddies and about 6 grandparents.
She understood that Matt wasn’t Hannah’s daddy. She was very mature in spirit. He was devastated. Over
the last year we were just starting to become friends and get over all
the stupid arguments we once had. Janessa
and Matt had just started bonding and we all thought they had a lifetime
to do it in. I wish now we
could take back all the juvenile arguments and would have realized how
important it was for us to get along.
We’ve had many memorials
donated in her name and I am grateful to those people who took the time
to remember her. We’ve
also had many signs from Janessa. My
mom’s cat had just “one” kitten on Janessa’s birthday.
Just one month after she had died.
I had asked Janessa for a sign on Hannah’s birthday and that
same mama cat died on Hannah’s birthday.
It wasn’t necessarily the sign I was looking for, but I think
she’s trying to tell us something.
Matt’s mother, Linda also
had a sign. She knew that
Janessa loved purple pansies, and she suddenly had them growing through
out her flower beds. Then,
one day she noticed there was one growing out in the middle of the yard.
I can see Janessa saying “No, that one goes in the grass, not
in the dirt.” She had her
own style of doing things. So,
Grandma Linda planted it next to her memorial rose bush for Janessa.
My mom and I also had all kinds of flowers growing in the flower
beds at our homes that weren’t there the year before. And this past summer, there seemed to be a ton of those big
yellow butterflies in the neighborhood.
This memorial page is
dedicated to my precious “Nessie”, (Janessa).
She will forever live in my heart and one magical day I will meet
her again up in Heaven. She
will be helping Jesus prepare a place for us, and be waiting with open
arms.
We
love you sweetheart!
If you have a loved one or a
friend that has been hurt at one of these Warehouse stores, please
e-mail me or sign my guestbook. We'd really love to be able to
connect with you and have some type of a support group for people
who have lost someone due to "falling merchandise".
Our Attorney
Breck Seiniger has a
site
You may write a letter to congress about these
"high stacking" warehouse stores.
This wonderful site for
parents who have lost a child.
I would like to invite you to see it.
"My Mom Is A Survivor"
and a another very good
site to help you with your grief.
"Grief
Recovery ONLINE for ALL Bereaved"
Police photo of the
countertops after the accident...
There are many
stores each year that have injuries and fatalities with consumers and
employees. Please read the stats below on the Warehouse Stores
across the country:
1992
-- 3 year old little girl crushed to death by falling door at a Home
Depot store in San Diego.
1994
-- 46 year old killed by a 3,000 pound pallet of ceramic tiles at a Home
Base in Edmonds, Wash.
1996
-- Small child killed when a wardrobe toppled at Sam's Club in Abilene,
Texas.
1997
-- Two year old girl died after a 100 pound television cabinet
fell on her in A Wal-Mart store in Virginia Beach, Virginia
1997
-- 36 year old employee of Home Depot died from falling ceramic
tiles/shelf collapsed in Miami, FL
1999
-- 79 year old woman killed at an L.A. Home Depot store when a forklift
operator knocked over a load of lumber stacked above her.
2000
-- 41 year old man was killed at a Connecticut Home Depot when a 2,000
pound pallet of landscaping timbers fell and pinned him to the ground.
There
are tons of these claims against warehouse super centers. In 1998
Home Depot was receiving 185 injury claims a week, many
involving falling merchandise. Please be careful when you are in
these stores, they may cost you or your child's life. The stores
view their high stacking concepts as "a cost of doing
business".
Other
stores with "Falling Merchandise" accidents: Sam's Club,
Wal Mart, Costco, Toys "R" Us, Home Base, K-mart, and of
course, Home Depot.
Thank
you for reading my daughter's story. Please be a sweetie, and sign my
guestbook.
I'd love to hear from you! And remember to be
careful. We were being careful in the store, and it still
happened.
Janessa's
story was featured Top Story in our local paper
Click here to read the article.
Would you
like to link to us.. Take our banner..
Help spread the word to prevent more tragedies like this..
This is the story of my Brother
 
You are listening to the theme song
from "Land Before Time"
"If We Hold on Together..."
by Diana Ross
Site designed and maintained
by Wendy's Backgrounds
and More...
|
