Grandmother’s Fear Came True When Carson Girl Stabbed

Every school day, Angelina Garcia’s grandmother worried about what might happen as the 8-year-old girl walked the two blocks from Dolores Elementary School to her home in Carson.

Virginia Trujillo worried so much that if Angelina was late by more than a minute or two, she went looking herself or sent the three younger children at her home to the end of the block as lookouts.

Her fears came true Wednesday.

While Angelina was walking home, an apparently deranged woman ran up and stabbed her three times, authorities said. Angelina is at Harbor UCLA Medical Center, where her doctor said she is expected to make a complete recovery from knife wounds to her neck, head and back.

Even so, said Trujillo, who is rearing her granddaughter, “my hands can’t stop shaking.”

Although a suspect has been arrested, the attack has sent tremors of fear through many parents and children at Angelina’s school, where she was an honor student and drill-team member.

Absenteeism was higher than normal Thursday, Principal Patrice Velasquez reported. Many parents who usually let their children walk drove them to and from school. School officials have attempted to calm fears by briefing teachers and offering psychological counseling to students.

Eddie Castro--Angelina’s 6-year-old cousin who was walking home with her when the attack occurred--had nightmares Wednesday and stayed home from school Thursday.

“He says he doesn’t want to go to school ever again,” said Eddie’s mother, Louise Ballesteros, who lives with Trujillo. “He says he is afraid that lady might come out again and attack him.”

She said Eddie told her, “Mom, it will not go out of my mind, all the blood I see on Angelina.” Ballesteros said she would seek psychological counseling for her son.

Trujillo and Ballesteros first knew about the attack about 3 p.m. Wednesday when Eddie ran into the house.

“Grandma, somebody is trying to kill Angelina!” Trujillo recalls Eddie yelling. She added: “I turned around and I ran and she was ready to die. She was all full of blood. I asked her what happened. She said a lady wouldn’t stop stabbing her.

“She was strong. She didn’t cry until she saw me crying. I don’t think she knew she was cut until she saw the blood.”

Sheriff’s Sgt. Don Cowell said witnesses reported that without warning or apparent reason, Alma Martinez, 33, had rushed across a street and stabbed Angelina repeatedly with a paring knife. In an apparently unrelated incident about 40 minutes before the attack, Martinez, who lives in the 2500 block of Fries Avenue, hit her mother with a 2-by-4 board, according to Detective Michael Gurrola. Martinez’s mother told the detective that her daughter had been a patient at Metropolitan State Hospital, a mental health facility in Norwalk, and that she had been acting strange lately.

Martinez has been booked on suspicion of attempted murder in connection with the attack on Angelina and on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in the beating of her mother, Gurrola said. She remains in custody, and no date has been set for arraignment.

“It sounds like she just flipped out,” Cowell said. “It will be up to the courts to decide whether she is sane or not.” Added Gurrola: “It is very weird, very bizarre.”

After the attack on Angelina, Ballesteros called for an ambulance. When it didn’t come right away, she and Trujillo jumped into their car and rushed Angelina to the hospital.

“It took too long for the ambulance,” Trujillo said. “She lost a lot of blood.” The little girl kept moaning that her neck hurt as Trujillo’s 1962 Falcon sped toward the hospital. “We flew,” Ballesteros said.

When they arrived, Trujillo said that attendants told her that “I was lucky I brought her, that I didn’t wait.”

The frightened little girl was taken to surgery, trying to hold onto her grandmother, clutching her hand so hard she drew blood with her nails, Trujillo said.

“She didn’t want to let me go,” she said. “She kept telling me, ‘Grandma, don’t let me go.’ ”

The last thing Angelina asked for before she was wheeled away was the teddy bear she sleeps with.

On Thursday, her neck swathed in bandages, she lay in sedated sleep on a hospital bed, oxygen coming through a face mask, her heartbeat making regular spikes on a monitor above the bed.

The bear was tucked lovingly under her arm.