Domini Rivera was headed home from a trade school in March, four months pregnant, looking forward to her new life as an esthetician.
Ambulance driver Joy Iris Schmitter was leaving the Denver Health Paramedic garage at Sixth Avenue and Bannock Street, headed to Alameda Avenue and Bannock.
Their lives were about to intersect. Rivera’s life would change forever.
Their vehicles collided at West Third Avenue and Bannock.
Eleven weeks later, her child, which she named April, was stillborn. Rivera still cries when she lifts the small vessel containing her daughter’s remains from her purse. April would have been Domini’s first child.
A soft-spoken person, Rivera worked two jobs after the accident, cleaning homes and as an esthetician, someone who gives facials, massages and waxing.
But casting a cloud over her life and work was the allegation she was at fault in the accident. She said the ambulance ran a stop sign without its lights or siren on.
Things got a little better for her when Schmitter failed to show up for Rivera’s trial and the case was dismissed.
She still has occasional nightmares and the blues, something she said she had more frequently when the case was pending.
“It still bothers me,” said Rivera, 23. “It’s tough with the holidays coming up and all the changes since last year. It’s just kind of the feeling I’ve been beaten up by the system.”
She’s grateful for her husband Myke, 34, and her two dogs, 5-year-old Guinness and 9- month-old Dillinger, a puppy she got when she lost her baby.
“They’ve kept me ‘gettin’ up and going’ sometimes in the morning,” she said of her dogs.
She likes to hang out with Myke, who was a singer in a hard-rock band for 15 years. Myke is now a “medical carrier,” taking specimens and X-rays between doctors’ offices and hospitals.
Myke surprised her recently when he announced that in March he will start training to be an emergency medical technician, a response to what happened to her on March 12.
They’re also trying to have a child again.
Just prior to the collision, Rivera said, she stopped at a stop sign at West Third Avenue and Bannock Street. She looked both ways at the four-way-stop intersection, saw and heard nothing and proceeded into the intersection, she said.
Schmitter, 27, said she was at the intersection when she received a “Code 10,” to proceed with lights and siren to Bayaud Avenue and Wolff Street. Schmitter said she turned on the lights and siren and slowly went around a car in front of her. She said she looked in both directions and started into the intersection.
But from there, their stories differ.
Schmitter said Rivera ran the stop sign and collided with the ambulance. Rivera said that as her car moved through the intersection, the ambulance ignored a stop sign and hit her car hard, ripping off her front bumper and damaging the passenger side.
Rivera was able to find witnesses who backed up her version, she said. And on the day of her trial, the case was dismissed because “we didn’t have the witness necessary to proceed, which was the ambulance driver,” prosecutor Vince DiCroce said.
He said as far he could tell, a subpoena was sent to Schmitter’s home. He has no idea why she didn’t show up. Schmitter declined to be interviewed.
Rivera also has gotten satisfaction from her insurance company, which decided, after she showed them the records and her eyewitnesses, that the collision was not her fault.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
