PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The jet that crashed Friday night was carrying an 11-year-old girl and her mother back home to Mexico. The girl had received treatment at Shriners Hospital for Children in Philadelphia for a life-threatening condition. About an hour after the girl and her mother left, hospital staff learned that her journey of hope had turned to tragedy.
“Following the journey that she had been on, it was just extremely devastating,” said Mel Bower, chief marketing and communications officer for Shriners Children’s Health System.
While the hospital did not identify the child and her mother, Bower was able to talk about her relationship with the hospital and her time there. Officials in Ensenada, her hometown in Mexico, identified the girl as Valentina Guzman Murillo, and her mother as Lizeth Murillo Ozuna.
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“She had come to us from her home country of Mexico with a complex condition that doctors agreed would be better treated in the United States,” Bower said.
“Her journey — that's quite a commitment for a family and for her mother to come with her and to stay with her for the entire duration of her treatment.”
Bower says that Valentina had finished her treatment after four months at Shriners and was finally headed home.
“We had, that same day, organized a send off for her, in which we brought together the caregivers and staff that knew her, the patients that she had gotten to know, and everyone gathered to wish her well as she was leaving,” Bower said.
“They made their way to the airport for their flight home. And it was about an hour, hour and a half, that we first realized that it was, in fact, our patient that had been impacted.”
Bower said, after confirming it was their patient who had died, the staff who worked with her and her mother were quickly notified.
“It continues to be very, very hard for the staff,” he said.
“People really get to know each other on a different level. There's, there's an everyday routine of, they come to the cafeteria, they see the workers there. They know the staff. They know, oh, it's Wednesday and you're working and, you know, and it's Saturday and you'll be off tomorrow, you know, those kinds of things.”
Bower says when he walked through the hospital in the days since, there’s been a definite sense of loss. The hospital held a somber goodbye knowing Valentina was off to live the rest of her life. He said about an hour to an hour and a half later they learned that life had ended.
“I've been asked a number of times, you know, how do we go forward from this? And we go forward the way that we do each and every day, which is we draw the strength that our patients show us, because they're the ones that are strong, they're the ones that are brave, they're the ones that are courageous. And so we will be tapping into an extra dose of that. And so our patients are how we will get through, and we will take her with us as we go forward.”