‘Good things cam out of it’ Carla Picard, fund-raiser and next-door neighbor

The evening of the day the 14 foreign workers died a year ago, Carla Picard was in her apartment directly across the hall from the one where most of the men lived. She impatiently was listening for a familiar sound.

The common hallway, though, was eerily quiet. She wanted – indeed yearned – to hear Delkin Padilla come up the stairs and into the hallway singing like he did every night when he and his roommates returned from long days thinning trees in Maine’s North Woods.

“Music was a big part of their lives,” said Picard during a recent interview in her Caribou home. “They always had a song.”

For most of the day, all Picard knew was that 14 foreign workers had drowned that morning when the passenger van they were in went off John’s Bridge into the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

She also knew there was only one survivor.

That was it. No names. No knowledge of whether they were her next-door neighbors.

She never stopped praying that the broadcast facts about the accident were untrue.

The sweet sounds of singing she never heard that night. That confirmed to Carla that the men who died were her friends from next door.

“We were still hoping, at 8 o’clock at night, that some of the guys were coming home,” Picard said.

The name of the survivor wasn’t released until the next day, and the 14 victims weren’t officially identified for yet another day.

On Friday, the day after the accident, she was at her kitchen table with two telephones in front of her ringing nonstop, Picard said.

“One phone was the Spanish phone and one phone was my phone,” explained Picard, who is the daughter of Sonny Tracy, the men’s landlord. “The hardest part of this entire thing was talking to family members when you could not tell them their family members were dead.”

Though she suspected her missing neighbors were indeed the victims, she could not tell their families until she had confirmation.

Over and over again that Friday, Picard would recite the words, “No estan aqui ahorita,” which means, “They’re not here right now.”

“The silence on the phone was very hard to take,” Picard said. “They’re waiting to hear some type of response that their family member is still alive.”

When word got out in town that the foreign workers who died had lived in Tracy’s apartments, Picard’s phone started ringing with calls from townspeople extending their condolences.

A friend told Picard, “Let me put a bug in your ear. Let me give you an idea.” Picard headed down to People’s Heritage Bank in Caribou and started the Migrant Relief Fund. For months, money poured in, including from a Waterville family that decided not to exchange Christmas gifts but instead contribute cash to the fund.

“When we all started this, we were hoping to raise $1,000 for everyone, even the survivor,” Picard said.

In two months’ time, the relief fund reached $89,450. Fourteen checks for $5,900 each went to the families of the 14 woodsmen who died, and another check for $6,850 was given to the sole survivor, Edilberto Morales-Luis, who was 24.

The Presque Isle Congregational Church earmarked its $950 donation specifically for the survivor.

“Good things came out of it,” Picard said. “It was a tragic thing, but we’re very glad we were able to give what we were able to give. I’m glad I was of service.”

Picard was pregnant when the men died, and “sometimes I wonder if he couldn’t sense the turmoil.” Her son, Brandon, was born more than 10 months ago and “he’s an angel.” Her daughter, Olivia, who is 21/2 years old, sometimes tells perfect strangers “Hello” in Spanish.

“My daughter, when she saw them, immediately said, ‘Hola! Hola!'” said Picard, snuggling her smiling blond-haired child. “They taught her how to say that.”

On Sept. 12, Picard, who teaches English as a second language in the Caribou School District, plans to hang the Guatemalan and Honduran flags, representing the men’s homelands, from their second-story apartment window “so that people will remember.” She will place a lighted candle in the same window.

“People sometimes are quick to forget,” Picard said. “I just want people to remember that they died working for the people of Maine. They were a part of us. We lost a part of us.”