LESSONS IN SURVIVAL

To Escape A Family Riven By Drugs And Violence, A Teen Struggles To Live On
Her Own And Build A Brighter Future. Saturday, She Was To Graduate.

The phone call came at 10 in the morning. A social services worker had
seized Darsella Vigil's 3-year-old niece.

The little girl's mother - Darsella's sister - lay in the hospital giving
birth to another child.

Hours later, the government took that baby, too.

Darsella Vigil's troubled family had imploded.

The 17-year-old trudged home from the hospital on that day, two years ago,
lugging the undeliverable toys and baby clothes she had bought for her
sister's newborn son.

Darsella thought then of the classes she had skipped looking after her
sister's daughter. She realized how caring for her family had hurt her
performance in school. She worried about the drug and alcohol abuse and the
violence that had consumed many members of her family.

On that day in 2003, Darsella asked herself a question:

"How can I care for anyone else if I can't take care of myself?"

Then she answered it.

"You have one last chance to turn your grades around and become successful
like you always wanted - to break the cycle of a family."

Her internal pep talk led to an exhausting, two-year academic journey. It
led Darsella to leave her family in 2004 to live on her own. Saturday, it
led Darsella to graduate from high school.

"I made a plan," she says. "Instead of dreaming about it, I acted upon it
in very little steps."

With those steps, Darsella Vigil won one more battle in a war that has
pitted a family's recipe for failure against a young woman's appetite for
success.

Saturday-Night Laundry

It is a Saturday night in March of this year. While many teenagers party,
19- year-old Darsella sorts laundry. Going to class and working full time
while living alone and trying to graduate from high school leave her little
choice.

"I don't have any help" from public aid, Darsella says, matching socks.
"They'll only help you if you've got a kid. A lot of my friends have kids.
I don't act out in that way."

She tries hard not to judge those who do.

Darsella doesn't want her mother's name in the newspaper. She won't talk
specifically about her mom's drug abuse.

Likewise, she doesn't want to make public the name of her sister who lost
her kids or discuss the case. Her sister declined an interview. Court
records show a transfer of custody that didn't involve criminal charges.

Darsella's 21-year-old brother, Jerry Derrera, has been running the streets
since he was 10. He says he's spent 40 percent of his life in jail.

Darsella's oldest sister, Nikki Johnson, survived by leaving home at 14,
when Darsella was 8. Nikki has no kids. She earned an associate degree and
now works as a security guard, with the goal of becoming a detective.

This is Darsella's world.

At least, it was.

Darsella's mother was upset when her daughter finally left home in April
2004. Darsella lived for a month with Nikki. Ever since, she has made ends
meet by herself.

Darsella, Nikki and their siblings grew up watching their mother be beaten
by abusive men.

"We would scream our heads off and hide behind the sofa," Darsella says.
"There'd be blood. The cops would come. They'd take the guy out in
handcuffs. Then the cops would take us to a safe house."

Domestic violence terrified the children. But what drove three of them away
were drugs.

"My mother's been through a lot," Darsella says. "I love my mother. She
raised four children by herself. She's a strong woman in many ways. I don't
want her presented in a negative light. She just has a habit.

"Usually if my mom would use drugs, she'd leave for a few days. She
wouldn't come home."

Sometimes, though, she stayed home behind locked bedroom doors to shield
her kids.

And then one night in 2004, she forgot to set the lock.

Nikki, who was staying at her mother's house for a few days, looked in the
bedroom. She went to Darsella, who lay in bed.

"Go to Mom's room," Nikki said.

Darsella went to her mother.

She won't give details about what she saw. She says only that she caught
her mother using drugs - and that "seeing is a lot different."

Darsella has a saying: "No matter where we go, we never forget where we
come from." Still, within weeks of catching her mother doing drugs, she
moved out.

Staying at home put at risk everything that she had achieved. By that time,
Darsella was not only close to salvaging her high school transcript, she
was chasing a college scholarship, hoping for a bachelor's degree and
dreaming of a career.

Playing An Adult Too Soon

Darsella sits in her cousin's house in Five Points. She has parked her 1992
Toyota Paseo outside and will soon ride the light rail to algebra class at
Community College of Denver. She can't afford to park downtown.

Darsella's cousin, Hope Dana, will play any role she can in a happy ending
for her relative. Dana, 37, knows how drugs can affect a family.

"I was an addict once," says Dana, who has been clean for a decade.

Dana's 9-year-old daughter, Destiny, grabs a seat beside her favorite cousin.

"She rocks," Destiny says of Darsella, "because she's always worrying about
getting to school."

Thanks to class overloads, Darsella finished high school courses in
December. If she hadn't moved out of her mother's house last year and
needed a full-time job to pay rent, she could have graduated on time last
spring.

Instead, she took an extra year in high school, trying to win a college
scholarship. She spent this semester earning college credits and making
straight A's at CCD and Middle College of Denver. She also worked in a
Teacher Cadet program. Toss in a full-time job at SoundTrack, along with
managing a household, and here's what you get: a young woman cramming in
algebra homework between the washing and drying cycles.

She has no time to relax on her apartment's faux leather sofa nor to
appreciate a woodcarving of a woman that hangs on her wall not far from a
copy of the Ten Commandments. The art came from the same place as the
biblical text and some of the furniture - the abandoned household items the
landlord hauled out when Darsella's mother and one of her sisters were
evicted from their last home.

"My mother might want it someday," Darsella reasons.

"She's like a little mom," says Darsella's mother.

Her mother refuses to answer questions about her personal life, but she's
proud of her youngest child and understands why she had to leave home.

"I kind of thought it would take her moving out (to get to college),"
Darsella's mother says. "I know it's for something good."

Certainly something better than what Darsella faced in April 2003, said Pat
Salas, an Adams City High School guidance counselor, who coached Darsella
as she tried for a college scholarship from the Daniels Fund.

The stress of playing an adult, trying to be everything for everybody,
started destroying Darsella in February 2002. She transferred to another
school and started skipping classes.

"Darsella was carrying the burden for so long," says her brother. "She
couldn't carry it anymore."

A year later, social services took her sister's kids. Darsella realized her
life was a wreck.

"After my niece was taken away, I turned - I don't want to say selfish -
but in a way I did. I wasn't helping my family as much. I did everything
for me. I was going to school. I was working."

"She's always been the strongest of all of us," said Derrera.

"I've been in and out of jail my whole life. I haven't been free for a
whole year for a long time. She's always been around this stuff (drugs,
violence, crime), but she's always chosen not to get involved."

With small, determined steps, Darsella reversed course.

After essentially flunking out of Denver's North High School, Darsella
enrolled herself in the Contemporary Learning Academy in fall 2003. She
asked administrators at the alternative school for students with grade and
attendance problems to take extra courses to make up for failed classes at
North.

Administrators said no.

Four months later, after getting straight A's in her first semester,
Darsella asked again. School officials agreed to let Darsella earn extra
credits, going to CLA all day and Emily Griffith Opportunity School most
nights while working 20 hours a week at a part-time job.

She has made nearly all A's since deciding to reclaim her life. Still, she
finished high school with less than a 3.0 grade-point average.

Don't look for a pity party.

Last month Darsella headed for the Daniels Fund office and her scholarship
interview. She said she wouldn't focus on her family's troubles. She would
stress the fact that she volunteers at a Latino theater and collects food
for battered women's shelters.

She smoothed the sides of her black suit.

"I'm nervous," she said, "but not so much that I want to throw up."

Unburdening Her Future

Her life was hard before she left home, and it's still hard: Darsella keeps
handy the small "Believe in yourself" plaque that her favorite teacher,
Janice Sullivan of Adams City Middle School, gave her five years ago.

Pat Bollacker's second-grade class at University Park Elementary School
demands more patience than faith. Darsella helps 8-year-old Alexus Richmond
play a math game. Darsella volunteers several days a week in the Teacher
Cadet program. She picked this class because Bollacker taught her in second
grade.

"Come over here, children," Bollacker calls to her students. "Miss Vigil's
going to teach us about doubles and halves."

A few hours and a light-rail ride later, she sharpens a dozen pencils and
dulls all of them taking notes as Fahridzal Omar teaches doubles and halves
in graphs of exponential functions.

"This," Omar tells his Community College of Denver algebra class, "is the
foundation of calculus, in case you take it."

"I will," Darsella replies without hesitation.

She'll do it as a Daniels Scholar, she learned a few weeks ago. The
University of Northern Colorado has accepted Darsella, and the Daniels Fund
will pay. Best of all, she will no longer need a full-time job.

Once she gets out from under the 80-hour weeks of school and work and those
lonely loads of Saturday laundry, oh the things she will do.

And the things she won't.

"What more could she have of drugs, drinking and partying than having it at
home with her family?" asks her cousin, Dana.

"A lot of people will judge me because of my family," Darsella says. "I
want to be successful. I'll never do drugs because I see the way it ruins
lives."

As she heads for her date with overstuffed washing machines and underheated
dryers, Darsella grabs a $10 roll of quarters and a box of detergent. She
passes through her bathroom looking for dirty clothes. She picks a necklace
off the windowsill. "I love U Darsella," it says.

"My brother made it for me," she recalls, "in prison."

That was before Jerry Derrera was paroled from prison in October 2004,
after serving 10 months for receiving a stolen car. It was before he began
his parole living with Darsella. It was before she badgered him into
getting a job, before he quit that job, started visiting his mother's house
and slipped into smoking crack.

"My intention was to save my mom (from using drugs)," Derrera says, sitting
in the Adams County Detention Center on parole violations. "Instead, I got
caught in a trap."

Darsella, he continues, "came to my mom's house and pulled me out. She
said, 'One more time and you're gone."'

He did more drugs the next day. Shortly thereafter, Derrera stood at the
door of his baby sister's apartment.

Get out, she told him.

He threw a key at her and left.

Darsella tried the key in the door. It didn't fit.

"I had the locks changed," she says.

That comes as no surprise.

Two years ago, a struggling young woman with a kind heart made a tough-love
pact with herself and her family.

She's held up the deal so far.