Teen takes over family after parents die

The 19-year-old said she was already managing the household.

SACRAMENTO BEE

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jonathan Bravo did recently what no 4-year-old should ever have to do.

He placed a candy bar, a gift, on the grave sites of his mother and father in St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Sacramento. The candy was chocolate, one of their favorites.

It was the Latino Day of the Dead celebration, Dia de los Muertos. For Jonathan and his six older brothers and sisters, it was also a day of heartache.

On Aug. 29, Jonathan’s father, Sergio Bravo, 40, fatally shot his mother, Maria Bravo, 37, then turned the gun on himself. Jonathan, a passenger in his father’s Chevrolet sport-utility vehicle, saw it all.

For more than two months, the family has grieved together. Now, Jonathan’s 19-year-old sister, Cristal Bravo, is doing her best to make sure her younger brothers and sisters grow up together.

“[Mom] always told me that her biggest fear was that my dad would do something to her and that would leave the youngest kids without a mom,” Cristal told The Sacramento Bee.

“Since my mom lef t this world without wanting to, I know she would have wished I would be the one to take care of them,” she said.

She is self-assured. Most of all, she is determined.

Her family includes sisters Daisy, 15, Gasmin, 11, and Yaretzi, 7; and brothers Jose, 17, Sergio, 16, and, of course, Jonathan, who will be 5 in December.

She is running the household, cooking the meals, arranging for transportation and dispensing the chores, as well as the love and discipline.

Community groups and individuals are trying to help, county public assistance is providing some money and more help is expected from Social Security.

“It’s amazing what Cristal is doing at the young age of 19 for her family,” said Cindy Beltz, a volunteer at the Elk Grove Community Food Bank Services and the yard supervisor at Sierra Enterprise Elementary School, which two of the children attend. “When these kids are older, they are going to look back at Cristal with love and fond memories for what she has done.”

Cristal said she is doing what she has always done.

“I was already managing the house,” Cristal said. “I’m a good cook. I learned how to work at a young age.”

She cooks large meals — enchiladas, chicken soup, chile rellenos, rice, beans.

One day recently, Cristal tossed garlic into a Mexican entrée as an aunt helped with laundry.

Cristal’s boyfriend, Leonel Ramirez, then drove her to Sierra Enterprise Elementary to pick up the youngest children getting out of school.

At home, Yaretzi, with big eyes and a bigger smile, made her bed.

“Can you hand me that blanket?” she said from her top bunk.

Jonathan, wearing his Spider-Man shirt, bounced a ball furiously until, bored, he clowned with an oversized stuffed bear, a gift from the workers at the Wellspring Women’s Center.

On many nights, Cristal said, Jonathan either sleeps with her or an older brother.

Gasmin sat on the floor of the noisy bedroom, worked on her math problems and tried to ignore the din.

She left the room once, to ask Daisy, “What’s 10 into 10?” Daisy answered: “One.”

“I think what she’s doing is taking a lot of guts because she’s only 19,” Daisy said later of Cristal. “She’s here, trying to keep us together, for my little brother too, for his sake.”

Daisy said her younger sisters were relieved to know that family members could stay together, “for us to help each other get through what happened.”

The night after the shootings, Cristal said county Child Protective Services placed all her brothers and sisters in foster care for the night. The next day, they were reunited.

“We were all together at my aunt’s house while I was trying to get my head together and do the funeral arrangements,” Cristal said. “After that, I started thinking straight.”

Soon, she said, it looked as though family members would be separated.

A social worker called a family meeting for mid-September to decide where the younger brothers and sisters should be placed.

One aunt wanted to take all the children, Cristal said. But that wasn’t practical. Other relatives had offered to take individual family members.

None of that appealed to Cristal.

“I thought we would be better off together,” she said. So, with the support of her extended family, Cristal appealed to the social worker to be named caregiver. Although the case remains open, Cristal got a favorable decision.

The next day, the worker gave Cristal affidavits of authorization to care for all six siblings.

She was ready.

The day after her parents’ burials, Cristal had cleaned her father’s empty rental house, the home where they all had lived before her parents separated and divorced.

The landlord said she could move the family in, despite her father’s three months of unpaid rent.

With help, she filled the house with the furniture left in her mother’s Sacramento apartment.