Friends, family mourn woman killed when plane struck her home

Oct. 23--LAKE WORTH -- Ash still dusted the right shoulder of Marta Galicia's turquoise cardigan from where she bent over to whisper goodbye to the soot-covered remains of her daughter.

The fire had smoldered for three days after a single-engine plane crashed into the family's Lake Worth mobile home on Oct. 13 while Banny Galicia, 21, napped inside.

Marta's family pleaded with her not to see Banny this way at the morgue. To remember her daughter instead as young, vibrant and alive.

But Marta had been in Guatemala for nearly two months visiting her 85-year-old mother when her son called her with the news. For a week, she could not rest -- could barely stop crying to speak -- until she saw for herself that her daughter was gone.

"They didn't want to let me because they knew it was going to be difficult. But I needed to," she said.

She woke up to pray at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday, two days after arriving from Guatemala.

"I cried and prayed to God to give me the strength to withstand what I was about to see," Galicia said.

When they pulled back the sheet, Marta leaned in close, prayed softly over her youngest child, and said she cried for the last time.

"I told her I loved her. I said goodbye and told her I would always carry her in my heart," Galicia said. "I wouldn't have been able to accept her death if I hadn't seen her. I can hand her over to God, now -- and now I can rest."

Family and friends will join her in saying goodbye at a wake at Banny's alma mater, Lake Worth High, Thursday at 7 p.m. Earlier, the hearse will drive Banny's body by the trailer home for a short prayer among family at the site where she spent her life.

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Banny Galicia had been Marta's miracle baby.

Marta was 40 when she found out she was pregnant again, 15 years since her last child.

"I had forgotten how to do everything," she chuckled.

Banny's older sister, Juri, carried the baby on her hip around the Mar-Mak Colony Club mobile home community where Banny lived all her life. Other family members who lived in that tight-knit Hispanic enclave at the trailer park happily spoiled her, too.

Marta remembers the way she would put on a baby voice and ask her father, Domingo, her "Papi," if he could make her eggs on a regular weekday morning when she was balancing work and school at Palm Beach State College.

She knew better than to ask Marta. Banny knew how to cook for herself -- and cook well. She was the one who helped her mother tie the tamales Marta sold to other working families in the community. She was the one who helped her barely-5-foot mom lift the pot of tamales onto the stove to boil.

"She had to learn because one day she said she was going to get married and had to learn to cook for her family," Marta said.

Banny wanted four children, maybe a set of twins, Marta said. She wanted Marta involved in her daily life to help in raising them one day.

When Banny wanted a car, Marta and Domingo added $8,000 to the $1,000 she'd saved for the down payment on a clean, used maroon SUV for which she paid all the insurance and monthly payments. (Though, sometimes, she'd use those same puppy dog eyes to borrow gas money from Papi, Marta remembered, smiling.)

"As little as we had, we gave her everything she wanted, any little thing she desired," Galicia said. "I'm so glad I never denied her anything. She was my special little girl."

As she sits on the covered porch of the trailer home that will soon be demolished, Marta still half-expects to watch her daughter pull up in the little SUV she always kept sparkling clean.

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She was so alive when they last spoke the day before the accident, Marta recalled. Marta was missing her husband and children and had asked Banny to look into changing her return date. She worried that her daughter needed her at home.

"She said, 'Mami, I'm grown up. I can take care of myself. Go, stay with abuelita and rest,'" Marta recalled.

If she had been home, Marta said she likely would have been sleeping in the room next to her daughter. Sometimes, she admits she wish she had.

"I wanted to die. I wanted to die right then and there," she said.

Now, all that's left is to lay Banny to rest.

Although she was American-born -- her father is a naturalized citizen, her mother a legal resident -- she will be buried in Guatemala, in the family's ancestral town of La Democracia, a town of about 40,000 people in the district of Huehuetenango.

She will be buried in a family plot, next to a brother who was killed in a car accident there 15 years ago, in a cemetery up on a hill you can see from the family's home. Marta, who will stay to care for her aging mother, will lay flowers at their grave.

"One day, if I'm faithful to the Lord, I know I will see her again," Galicia said.

Until then, she will look out at the place where Banny Galicia is buried, and be reminded of the time she had with her daughter on earth.

"God gave me a gift for 21 years and 5 months," Galicia said. "I will celebrate that."

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