Commerce City — It took four minutes for 11-year-old Mercedes King’s heart to stop after doctors took her off life-support.
Lisa King, who moments before had laid down in Mercedes’ hospital bed after doctors convinced them her little girl was gone, couldn’t face her.
“I never would have been able to leave if I did,” King, 36, said Tuesday, crying and rubbing her daughter’s plastic, orange hospital bracelet that she still wears. “When they gave her the MRI tests, they had to take off her earrings, and I put them on. I still can’t take them off, and I still haven’t accepted that she’s gone.”
Standing at the corner memorial at 60th Street and Monaco Parkway as cars whiz by, Lisa King and her husband Mark Filley, 43, prop up flowers and cards and stuffed animals left by friends and relatives of Mercedes.
“There’s an angel at this corner now,” Mark Philley said, looking over the flowers. “People need to slow down at this intersection though. Nobody passes through here going the speed limit.”
It was at this corner last Friday morning that a car blew through a red light and smashed into the passenger side of a Dodge Neon carrying Mercedes to her first day at Kearney Middle School.
Her funeral services will be at 10 a.m., Saturday at Our Lady of Mother Church, 6690 E 72nd Ave.
Following that, there will be a reception at Kearney School, 6160 Kearney St., giving Mercedes the day in school she had been looking forward to, her parents said.
Yesica Moreno, the 24-year-old driver of the Grand Prix that smashed into the car driven by Mercedes’ brother, was not injured. Mercedes brother, Marcus King, suffered a broken arm.
Police have not filed charges against Moreno. The investigation is ongoing.
The crash happened a block from Mercedes’ home. The impact caved in the car around her, and a bystander helped cut the girl from her seat belt to remove her.
When Marcus King came to, he called his father and told him that “Mercedes isn’t waking up.”
Filley arrived just in time to see his daughters eyes closing for the final time.
“I knew at that moment she was gone — I just knew it,” he said.
Mercedes was on life support at The Children’s Hospital overnight and doctors had done everything to bring her back, but her skull brain stem had been severed. And it came to the point where doctors were doing everything to show she was dead, Filley said.
“I don’t think she felt any pain, really,” he said. “I think she went instantly. She had to.”
Mercedes was vivacious, giving and loved everyone around her, family and friends said. She kept in touch with a former grade school teacher over the summer by e-mail and was eager to begin middle school, her mother said.
“She was totally excited,” Lisa King said.
“I think that she just had such a good personality that she always felt like she could fit in anywhere she went.”
In addition to her stuffed animals, Mercedes loved Winnie the Pooh and Tinkerbell. A month prior to the crash, she painted a mural on her bedroom wall of Tinkerbell.
“She wanted to be a fairy, she wanted fairy wings,” her cousin, Destiny Baggett, 16, said.
Among the flowers at the corner memorial at two cards adored with cats, left there by the woman who crashed into Mercedes. The woman only wrote her name inside one of the cards, but has come back every day to tell Mercedes’ father that she’s sorry.
“She’s got to live with what she’s done for the rest of her life,” Filley said. “Just like I have to live without Mercedes for the rest of mine.”
Staff writer Manny Gonzales can be reached at 303-954-1537 or mgonzales@denverpost.com
Contributions can be made to help Mark Philley, a carpenter, and Lisa King, who manages an International House of Pancakes in Brighton, pay for their daughter’s funeral costs through Rocky Mountain Law Enforcement Credit Union, account number 23007352, 700 W 39th Ave. in Denver, 80216.
