The phone call came at 10 in the morning. A social services worker had seized Darsella Vigil’s 3-year-old niece.
The little girl’s mother – Darsella’s sister – lay in the hospital giving birth to another child.
Hours later, the government took that baby, too.
Darsella Vigil’s troubled family had imploded.
The 17-year-old trudged home from the hospital on that day, two years ago, lugging the undeliverable toys and baby clothes she had bought for her sister’s newborn son.
Darsella thought then of the classes she had skipped looking after her sister’s daughter. She realized how caring for her family had hurt her performance in school. She worried about the drug and alcohol abuse and the violence that had consumed many members of her family.
On that day in 2003, Darsella asked herself a question:
“How can I care for anyone else if I can’t take care of myself?”
Then she answered it.
“You have one last chance to turn your grades around and become successful like you always wanted – to break the cycle of a family.”
Her internal pep talk led to an exhausting, two-year academic journey. It led Darsella to leave her family in 2004 to live on her own. Saturday, it led Darsella to graduate from high school.
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“I made a plan,” she says. “Instead of dreaming about it, I acted upon it in very little steps.”
With those steps, Darsella Vigil won one more battle in a war that has pitted a family’s recipe for failure against a young woman’s appetite for success.
Saturday-night laundry
It is a Saturday night in March of this year. While many teenagers party, 19- year-old Darsella sorts laundry. Going to class and working full time while living alone and trying to graduate from high school leave her little choice.
“I don’t have any help” from public aid, Darsella says, matching socks. “They’ll only help you if you’ve got a kid. A lot of my friends have kids. I don’t act out in that way.”
She tries hard not to judge those who do.
Darsella doesn’t want her mother’s name in the newspaper. She won’t talk specifically about her mom’s drug abuse.
Likewise, she doesn’t want to make public the name of her sister who lost her kids or discuss the case. Her sister declined an interview. Court records show a transfer of custody that didn’t involve criminal charges.
Darsella’s 21-year-old brother, Jerry Derrera, has been running the streets since he was 10. He says he’s spent 40 percent of his life in jail.
Darsella’s oldest sister, Nikki Johnson, survived by leaving home at 14, when Darsella was 8. Nikki has no kids. She earned an associate degree and now works as a security guard, with the goal of becoming a detective.
This is Darsella’s world.
At least, it was.
Darsella’s mother was upset when her daughter finally left home in April 2004. Darsella lived for a month with Nikki. Ever since, she has made ends meet by herself.
Darsella, Nikki and their siblings grew up watching their mother be beaten by abusive men.
“We would scream our heads off and hide behind the sofa,” Darsella says. “There’d be blood. The cops would come. They’d take the guy out in handcuffs. Then the cops would take us to a safe house.”
Domestic violence terrified the children. But what drove three of them away were drugs.
“My mother’s been through a lot,” Darsella says. “I love my mother. She raised four children by herself. She’s a strong woman in many ways. I don’t want her presented in a negative light. She just has a habit.
“Usually if my mom would use drugs, she’d leave for a few days. She wouldn’t come home.”
Sometimes, though, she stayed home behind locked bedroom doors to shield her kids.
And then one night in 2004, she forgot to set the lock.
Nikki, who was staying at her mother’s house for a few days, looked in the bedroom. She went to Darsella, who lay in bed.
“Go to Mom’s room,” Nikki said.
Darsella went to her mother.
She won’t give details about what she saw. She says only that she caught her mother using drugs – and that “seeing is a lot different.”
Darsella has a saying: “No matter where we go, we never forget where we come from.” Still, within weeks of catching her mother doing drugs, she moved out.
Staying at home put at risk everything that she had achieved. By that time, Darsella was not only close to salvaging her high school transcript, she was chasing a college scholarship, hoping for a bachelor’s degree and dreaming of a career.
Playing an adult too soon
Darsella sits in her cousin’s house in Five Points. She has parked her 1992 Toyota Paseo outside and will soon ride the light rail to algebra class at Community College of Denver. She can’t afford to park downtown.
Darsella’s cousin, Hope Dana, will play any role she can in a happy ending for her relative. Dana, 37, knows how drugs can affect a family.
“I was an addict once,” says Dana, who has been clean for a decade.
Dana’s 9-year-old daughter, Destiny, grabs a seat beside her favorite cousin.
“She rocks,” Destiny says of Darsella, “because she’s always worrying about getting to school.”
Thanks to class overloads, Darsella finished high school courses in December. If she hadn’t moved out of her mother’s house last year and needed a full-time job to pay rent, she could have graduated on time last spring.
Instead, she took an extra year in high school, trying to win a college scholarship. She spent this semester earning college credits and making straight A’s at CCD and Middle College of Denver. She also worked in a Teacher Cadet program. Toss in a full-time job at SoundTrack, along with managing a household, and here’s what you get: a young woman cramming in algebra homework between the washing and drying cycles.
She has no time to relax on her apartment’s faux leather sofa nor to appreciate a woodcarving of a woman that hangs on her wall not far from a copy of the Ten Commandments. The art came from the same place as the biblical text and some of the furniture – the abandoned household items the landlord hauled out when Darsella’s mother and one of her sisters were evicted from their last home.
“My mother might want it someday,” Darsella reasons.
“She’s like a little mom,” says Darsella’s mother.
Her mother refuses to answer questions about her personal life, but she’s proud of her youngest child and understands why she had to leave home.
“I kind of thought it would take her moving out (to get to college),” Darsella’s mother says. “I know it’s for something good.”
Certainly something better than what Darsella faced in April 2003, said Pat Salas, an Adams City High School guidance counselor, who coached Darsella as she tried for a college scholarship from the Daniels Fund.
The stress of playing an adult, trying to be everything for everybody, started destroying Darsella in February 2002. She transferred to another school and started skipping classes.
“Darsella was carrying the burden for so long,” says her brother. “She couldn’t carry it anymore.”
A year later, social services took her sister’s kids. Darsella realized her life was a wreck.
“After my niece was taken away, I turned – I don’t want to say selfish – but in a way I did. I wasn’t helping my family as much. I did everything for me. I was going to school. I was working.”
“She’s always been the strongest of all of us,” said Derrera. “I’ve been in and out of jail my whole life. I haven’t been free for a whole year for a long time. She’s always been around this stuff (drugs, violence, crime), but she’s always chosen not to get involved.”
With small, determined steps, Darsella reversed course.
After essentially flunking out of Denver’s North High School, Darsella enrolled herself in the Contemporary Learning Academy in fall 2003. She asked administrators at the alternative school for students with grade and attendance problems to take extra courses to make up for failed classes at North.
Administrators said no.
Four months later, after getting straight A’s in her first semester, Darsella asked again. School officials agreed to let Darsella earn extra credits, going to CLA all day and Emily Griffith Opportunity School most nights while working 20 hours a week at a part-time job.
She has made nearly all A’s since deciding to reclaim her life. Still, she finished high school with less than a 3.0 grade-point average.
Don’t look for a pity party.
Last month Darsella headed for the Daniels Fund office and her scholarship interview. She said she wouldn’t focus on her family’s troubles. She would stress the fact that she volunteers at a Latino theater and collects food for battered women’s shelters.
She smoothed the sides of her black suit.
“I’m nervous,” she said, “but not so much that I want to throw up.”
Unburdening her future
Her life was hard before she left home, and it’s still hard: Darsella keeps handy the small “Believe in yourself” plaque that her favorite teacher, Janice Sullivan of Adams City Middle School, gave her five years ago.
Pat Bollacker’s second-grade class at University Park Elementary School demands more patience than faith. Darsella helps 8-year-old Alexus Richmond play a math game. Darsella volunteers several days a week in the Teacher Cadet program. She picked this class because Bollacker taught her in second grade.
“Come over here, children,” Bollacker calls to her students. “Miss Vigil’s going to teach us about doubles and halves.”
A few hours and a light-rail ride later, she sharpens a dozen pencils and dulls all of them taking notes as Fahridzal Omar teaches doubles and halves in graphs of exponential functions.
“This,” Omar tells his Community College of Denver algebra class, “is the foundation of calculus, in case you take it.”
“I will,” Darsella replies without hesitation.
She’ll do it as a Daniels Scholar, she learned a few weeks ago. The University of Northern Colorado has accepted Darsella, and the Daniels Fund will pay. Best of all, she will no longer need a full-time job.
Once she gets out from under the 80-hour weeks of school and work and those lonely loads of Saturday laundry, oh the things she will do.
And the things she won’t.
“What more could she have of drugs, drinking and partying than having it at home with her family?” asks her cousin, Dana.
“A lot of people will judge me because of my family,” Darsella says. “I want to be successful. I’ll never do drugs because I see the way it ruins lives.”
As she heads for her date with overstuffed washing machines and underheated dryers, Darsella grabs a $10 roll of quarters and a box of detergent. She passes through her bathroom looking for dirty clothes. She picks a necklace off the windowsill. “I love U Darsella,” it says.
“My brother made it for me,” she recalls, “in prison.”
That was before Jerry Derrera was paroled from prison in October 2004, after serving 10 months for receiving a stolen car. It was before he began his parole living with Darsella. It was before she badgered him into getting a job, before he quit that job, started visiting his mother’s house and slipped into smoking crack.
“My intention was to save my mom (from using drugs),” Derrera says, sitting in the Adams County Detention Center on parole violations. “Instead, I got caught in a trap.”
Darsella, he continues, “came to my mom’s house and pulled me out. She said, ‘One more time and you’re gone.”‘
He did more drugs the next day. Shortly thereafter, Derrera stood at the door of his baby sister’s apartment.
Get out, she told him.
He threw a key at her and left.
Darsella tried the key in the door. It didn’t fit.
“I had the locks changed,” she says.
That comes as no surprise.
Two years ago, a struggling young woman with a kind heart made a tough- love pact with herself and her family.
She’s held up the deal so far.
Staff writer Jim Spencer can be reached at jspencer@denverpost.com or 303-820-1771.