Tiffany

Tiffany Martinez turned 14 on Sunday. The day would end with her in the intensive-care unit of Hasbro Children’s Hospital, unconscious, her brain apparently badly damaged, a respirator supporting her after nearly drowning in the unforgiving waters off Warwick’s Conimicut Point. She remained in that condition last night.

Her birthday began as birthdays do for girls her age, with the promise of fun. She was fishing with her family at Providence’s India Point Park when her mother’s phone rang. Friends wanted to know if the family wanted to join them at the beach. It was sunny and warm, school done for the year, the Fourth of July just around the corner.

Josephine Gonzalez, Tiffany’s mother, thought the beach sounded perfect.

“Tiffany got excited,” Josephine says.

Josephine and her husband, Carlos Gonzalez, and their son, Carlos Jr., 3, and Tiffany returned to their home in East Providence. They cooked Spanish rice, chicken and fish, packed a picnic basket and cooler with fruit and juice and met their friends at Conimicut. Josephine and Carlos had married at a wedding chapel there in 2002, but they had never been to that beach. With the price of gas so high, Warwick was more inviting than distant South County.

Josephine and Carlos sit on a bench outside Hasbro Children’s Hospital last night recounting how the remainder of the afternoon unfolded.

“We were there maybe an hour,” Josephine says. “The kids were playing, diving in the waves.”

The older children were on a sandbar when Josephine and Carlos noticed that the current had changed.

“We called them in,” Carlos says, but the water was already ahead of them.

“The current came in and started ripping and dragging them in,” says Carlos. “That’s when the chaos developed.”

Carlos shed his boots and headed into the water. He could see that Tiffany, who knows how to swim, was in trouble.

“She was under stress,” he says.

She was carrying the family friends’ son, Jose Vieira, 8, on her back.

“Trying to keep him from drowning,” Josephine says.

Tiffany, a cheerleader, possesses a “heart of gold,” her mother says. “She’ll help anyone before helping herself.”

Carlos swam out.

When he got to Tiffany and Jose, he says, “I separated them. I tried putting one on one side, one on the other, swimming.”

Reaching this part of the story, Carlos is pulled by emotion. “It’s playing in my head,” he says. His face is anguished. What happened happened barely 24 hours before.

Carlos tried carrying the girl and the boy on his back, but they were too much.

“So I’m pushing them up, trying to keep them out of the waves.”

Propelling one with his left hand and the other with his right, Carlos moved them toward shore. He approached a kayak, and Jose was brought on board, safe now. That left Carlos with Tiffany, in the waves.

“She was still conscious,” Carlos says. “She was talking to me.”

She was saying: Please don’t let me go.

And Carlos was saying: Baby, I’m not.

Please don’t let me go.

These are the last words Tiffany will say on her birthday.

Rescue personnel, meanwhile, had gathered –– but, Carlos and Josephine say, minutes passed and none of them entered the water. Perhaps the current was too treacherous.

Josephine, on shore with Carlos Jr., was begging: “Please, my family’s in the water!”

The kayak returned to the father and the daughter and Carlos helped Tiffany onto it.

“She was unconscious,” Carlos says. “The acid was coming out of her mouth and her nose.”

“She inhaled too much water,” says Josephine.

“While she was saving Jose,” Carlos says.

Carlos sits again on the bench outside Hasbro Children’s, where both families are praying at Tiffany’s bedside.

“She’s not brain-dead, but she’s sustained a lot of brain damage,” Josephine says.

Tammy Vieira, Jose’s mother, introduces her son to a reporter. Jose is a handsome boy, 70 pounds, his hair in braids.

“He’s fine, thanks to Tiffany,” Tammy says.

“Everyone has a destiny in life,” Josephine says.

Tiffany’s, she says, was saving Jose.

“If it wasn’t for her,” says Tammy, “my son would probably be dead. She’s my son’s guardian angel.”

A hospital guard tells the families it’s time to lock the door near the bench. They disappear into the hospital, back to the intensive-care unit, to Tiffany, 14 years and two days old this morning.

gwmiller@projo.com