Tree limb falls in park, shattering mother’s life
Paralyzed woman struggles 10 months after S.F. incident
The last thing she remembers is her daughters leaning down to feed the birds.
Emma Zhou, 36, had just finished eating dim sum with her two little girls in North Beach’s Washington Square Park. It was a late afternoon in mid-August last year, the kind of Friday that lulls people into sunbathing on the grass. Zhou sat on a bench beneath the shade of a huge Canary Island pine watching the girls throw stale bread to the pigeons. The soft swish of the leaves overhead and the cadence of her children’s laughter was intoxicating.
It would be her last normal moment, the divide between then and now.
Zhou has no memory of the 100-pound pine limb snapping off its trunk, or of it crushing the bench she was sitting on. When officers arrived just after 3:10 p.m., they found her lying on the sidewalk screaming for help,
her head in a halo of blood. Her 5- and 9-year-old daughters stood frozen. By the time medics took her vital signs and strapped her onto a gurney, she was unresponsive.
She awoke in a hospital room to a cacophony of chirping medical equipment. A piercing pain radiated up her spine and into her skull. Nurses in cranberry-colored scrubs adjusted the plastic cone around her neck. Her husband, mother-in-law and daughters, the oldest bandaged where the branch had scraped her back, peeked around the door frame. Opioids clouded Zhou’s understanding of the scene.
More than 10 months after the pine limb crushed her skull and severed her spinal cord, Zhou remains at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco.
She and her husband, Tony Tan, 46, have sued the city, claiming its care of the tree was negligent. As bills stack up and court proceedings grind forward, Zhou is trapped in a medical purgatory as her daughters begin to grow up without her.
She is paralyzed from the waist down and will never walk again, doctors say. It could have been anyone sitting under the tree in the park that day. But it is her life that has been permanently interrupted.
“I felt happy and satisfied easily,” she said of life before the accident, “and I felt grateful for everything. Now …,” her voice trails off.
This was not the life she and Tan envisioned when they emigrated from China. He came first, moving with his parents from Taishan in the southern Guangdong province to San Francisco in 1984 when he was 13. In 2002, a mutual friend introduced them. Zhou was living in Kaiping, a small city on the Pearl River Delta 45 minutes north of Tan’s hometown. They fell in love over trans-Pacific phone calls and married there in 2003. She moved to Northern California a year later.
The couple bought a twobedroom home in San Pablo with a big backyard to grow Swiss chard, chives, bok choy, tomatoes and kale. They brought two cherubic-faced baby girls in pink knit hats home to that house. Tan got a job repairing electronics at Central Computers on Howard Street. Zhou took English language classes at City College and shuttled the girls to school. She cooked sticky rice and elaborate cakes decorated with strawberries sliced to look like blooming flowers.
Before she was a paraplegic, Zhou ran laps around their neighborhood every morning. She wanted to register for a race, maybe even a marathon, and feel the weight of a medal around her neck. She volunteered in her older daughter’s classroom. Someday, she hoped to work at a hair salon and would practice on her family, trimming her daughters’ bangs and shaving Tan’s sideburns.
Every Sunday, they went to Myoshinji Temple in Pinole. At first, Tan would nap in the car in the Buddhist shrine’s parking lot while Zhou attended services. But he was fascinated by the parishioners’ tranquillity, so he joined. It opened his heart, he said, and brought him newfound peace.
It was a simple life, an easy life, Tan said.
And then the tree branch fell.
In the days after the Aug. 12 accident, no one knew whom to blame. City officials trucked the branch to an outside arborist for an examination, searching for clues as to why it had snapped. Then they locked away the limb — now evidence — at an undisclosed location.
In November, Zhou and Tan filed a lawsuit against the city in San Francisco Superior Court seeking damages greater than $25,000 for negligence. Her hospital expenses are partly covered by health insurance, but it won’t be enough to cover a lifetime of medical dependency — those costs are not yet calculable. Their GoFundMe campaign is more than $7,000 short of its $50,000 goal.
Their suit says the Canary Island pine had been “negligently pruned” in a way that “causes the rapid growth of large, heavy and weakly attached branches,” which can kill people. Her attorneys say that the city had received reports of falling tree branches in that same part of the park.
“The city knows that trees pruned like this must be watched closely and pruned frequently because they will continue to develop branches that are too heavy and large for the tree to support,” said attorney Jeremy Cloyd, who is representing Zhou and her family.
The tree whose branch struck Zhou had been trimmed through a tree topping method, the lawsuit says. The upper part of the 50-foot-tall tree was removed, allowing its lateral branches to grow rapidly.
Tree assessment records show that the city was slow to routinely inspect and maintain the pine trees near the Washington Square playground to industry standards, which call for pruning every 15 years.
The Recreation and Park Department says budget shortfalls have long impacted tree maintenance. Each of the 177,000 trees on the department’s land was scheduled to be serviced only once every 105 years as of 2010. But department officials say that $8 million in bond funding over the past seven years and $750,000 from the General Fund annually has helped speed tree maintenance.
Tree experts say Canary Island pines are typically stable compared with other trees. In a database run by the International Society of Arboriculture, only 24 of 6,026 tree failures since 1987 in California involved that species. Eight of the 24 Canary Island pine failures — when a trunk, branch or root breaks — in California involved broken limbs like the branch that hit Zhou.
But city arborists who examined the tree multiple times after the limb split off and hit Zhou maintain it is structurally sound. The tree was not trimmed using a tree-topping method, city officials say, and the branch falling was a fluke.
“We’re still gathering and assessing all of the information we can, but at the moment there is no indication that this was anything but an unforeseeable, freak accident,” said John Coté, a spokesman for
“Before the accident happened, I was more confident. ... Before the accident, I was a more cheerful person.” Emma Zhou
City Attorney Dennis Herrera. “This is a heartbreaking situation. At the same time, the city has a legal responsibility to all taxpayers that we must honor. We are doing everything we can to work in good faith with the plaintiffs.”
About 25 to 35 people are killed by falling trees or branches annually in the United States, said Tom Schmidlin, a professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University, who studies and tracks tree-related storm deaths.
In 2008, a redwood limb in Stern Grove snapped, striking and killing a San Francisco woman as she loaded her dog into the back of a Subaru Outback. In January, a tree crushed a Ukiah home, killing a woman as she slept. But Zhou lived. “Before, I would never pay attention,” Zhou said in Cantonese through an interpreter. “Now every time I go under a tree, I think, is it going to fall?”
“Ten more minutes, Emma,” said Richard Sigua, a physical therapy aide at the rehabilitation center in the shadow of Twin Peaks.
Zhou’s eyes are fixed on a blinking plastic kitchen timer counting down the seconds. Her legs are strapped in a metal brace, and she stands tall and unassisted. Late February sun streams through the windows, alighting on the new strands of white in her hair. Across the gym, patients in wheelchairs circled an instructor teaching Zumba. They waved their hands to the beat of “The Macarena.”
Doctors are trying to slow the steady atrophy of the muscles Zhou once used to run, play basketball and to crouch to hug her daughters. They have her lift weights on a rickshaw — she started at 40 pounds and can now pull 60. She flexes her growing biceps after each set, proud of the newfound strength. Three times a week, she stands in a metal brace.
Zhou’s once-strong and lithe body has become the enemy: her quadriceps jumping with spasms, nerves misfiring, muscles atrophying and toes pointing in a perpetual ballerina’s tendu. Contractions ripple up to her stomach, the pain whitehot.
After the exercises, Zhou goes to the art room. She paints bluejays with moist pink worms dangling from their beaks and Mount Tamalpais shrouded in a layer of coastal fog. This is Zhou’s life now: a parade of doctor’s appointments, rehabilitation sessions and crafts, most contained within the hospital’s walls.
She knits teal scarves, paints and watches Korean soap operas on TV, the tedium the only thing she can count on. She looks out the window at the undulating grass. Robins chatter through the thick glass, and pigeons peck at the cement. She prays, reciting the same intention over and over: Let me walk. Let me walk again. Let me live outside of this wheelchair. Let me be the mother and wife I once was.
But there is no timeline for being discharged. And she can’t go home because her San Pablo house isn’t equipped for a woman in a wheelchair.
“I think about if my husband will despise me, or if he will leave me someday,” she said. “Before the accident happened, I was more confident. I felt happier and lived with my family without any worries. I felt blessed at that time. Before the accident, I was a more cheerful person.”
Her husband and daughters have moved in with his parents in the four-bedroom Visitacion Valley condominium where he grew up. Tan was once shot on the sidewalk out front during an attempted robbery. The bullet is still lodged in his left arm. He had moved to a safer neighborhood in the East Bay for his family. But after his wife was injured, he moved home so his parents could help with his daughters and to be closer to the hospital.
“Life takes you places,” Tan said. “Sometimes you can’t avoid it. It takes you back, even though you want to move on to a better place.”
He brings Chinese broccoli and catfish stew to Zhou, bottles of acrylic paint from Michael’s art supply and primarycolored helium balloons from their nephew’s first birthday party.
At night, Tan’s mind flashes back to the first X-ray and the sliver of black where there shouldn’t be: his wife’s spinal cord separated. When sleep won’t come, he reaches for his cell phone, searching for solutions: spinal surgeries in China, acupuncture techniques, stem cell research.
Tan buys a tan van with a handicap lift off Craigslist for $7,000 and a used wheelchair on eBay for $2,500. He learns to cook simple recipes in his mother’s kitchen — hardboiled eggs and oatmeal — and shop for tiny jumpers and jackets for his daughters at discount department stores.
He has taken a leave of absence from work to be both parents for the girls. At night, they often wake up screaming or sleepwalk around the condo. For weeks after the accident, his younger daughter stopped talking.
Sometimes, he sits in Zhou’s room watching midday TV and flipping through the business cards he keeps in his pocket: city officials, doctors, social workers, marriage counselor, contractors, child therapists and physical therapists. They are the people who will try to equip his parents’ home — the couple’s San Pablo house has too many barriers — with wide hallways and long ramps for Zhou’s wheelchair, fix the trauma of what their daughters saw, fix their marriage. But they can’t fix everything.
“We’ll all be together,” Tan said, his voice cracking. “But it will never be normal again for her. I don’t understand why. If the tree was healthy, why did it drop down so fast? To me, it’s bad luck. Really, really bad luck.”
On an afternoon in early April, her daughters visit Zhou at Laguna Honda.
They walk alongside their mother’s wheelchair to the small farm on the hospital’s campus in search of the gray tabby that likes to sit in Zhou’s lap. The girls inspect the strawberry blossoms and the blooming Icelandic poppies. They fling water from a bucket into the sky, screaming. Their visits are few, twice a week, sometimes more during school breaks.
They stand taller than Zhou’s wheelchair now, more unfamiliar to her with each passing week. Their hair has grown longer; their fingernails are painted by someone else. Her older girl has started reading the Harry Potter series, the youngest has learned to brush her own teeth. Zhou thinks about them leaving her, the day they will no longer need their mother. She wonders if they even need her now.
It must be karma, Zhou decides, the lingering consequences from sinning in a past life. The tree branch, and everything that has come after, was never meant for anyone else. The vials of prescription pills, the dependency on strangers to change her diapers, a lifetime condemned to a wheelchair — all for her. She has stopped asking why. “The world is still a beautiful place,” her husband tells her. “You have your daughters. You could have been like the woman in Ukiah. She didn’t even have a chance. You’re lucky.”
“Maybe she was the lucky one,” Zhou replies.
Her sadness ebbs and grows. She cries for hours, not certain just why. In the first few months, she considered suicide, but not anymore. Now, she often doesn’t feel anything, she said.
Months after the accident, Zhou sketches in bed. Plastic packages of baby wipes, deodorizer and sharp-tipped colored pencils litter the bedside table. Trinkets from the friends she rarely sees and drawings of the shaded places she can no longer walk cover the walls.
Her calves, swollen in their compression socks, peek from under a blanket. She runs her fingers through her hair, hiding the thick white scar arcing along the curve of her skull. Ten months and still no end in sight.
In her drawing, Zhou sits facing a tree. The dark of her silhouette, face hidden, fades to the white of a sky brightened by sunshine. A ghost floats above the grass. Devils peer from the bushes.
“I’m trying to draw my own story and my own fear,” she said.
In her picture, the tree branch never falls.