By MARI SAUGIER Caller-Times

March 10, 2006

Andres Perez picked a baseball-print lining for his son's coffin and roses for his daughter's, who was always his little princess.

He'd swapped stories about his family with other Army infantrymen in Iraq, about his 11-year-old son who played baseball and was good at math, and his 9-year-old daughter who won ribbons for kickball. The four days since a car accident killed his wife, Marcelina Balboa Perez, 31, son, Andres Perez Jr., and relative Benjamin Resendez, 26, on County Road 170 and State Highway 44 in Jim Wells County have been a nightmare, he said. The family lives in San Diego.

When Kassandra Perez was declared brain-dead Wednesday, Perez hesitated to donate her organs. He didn't want her to get hurt any more.

But on his family's advice and encouragement, he decided Kassie would have wanted to have the chance to save another child's life. It was one of the hardest decisions he's ever made.

"What led me to do that was people could benefit themselves from that, people wouldn't have to go through that, their families wouldn't have to go through what I'm going through," Perez said.

Four people died in the tragedy, but five children will live, said Kassie's aunt, Gracie Perez, thanks to the fourth-grader who loved SpongeBob SquarePants and collected snow globes. That helped Kassie's father find some peace, she said.

The five children, three girls and two boys 8 to 18 years old, would have died without Kassie's donation, said Pam Silvestri, spokeswoman for the Southwest Transplant Alliance, which handles area organ donations.

"Thanks to this decision that this man made under circumstances that really are indescribable, losing all his family at once, five other families aren't going to have to deal with losing a child," she said.

Kassie and Andres were loving children who would run up and hug her even if they hadn't seen her in a while, Gracie Perez said.

She was close with their mother, who was her sister-in-law, and the two spoke less than a week before the accident. She said the woman she called Marcy was intelligent, and shehad encouraged her to go back to school. Marcy was making plans to return this summer so she could teach geometry at San Diego High School where she was a substitute teacher.

"We were always laughing, doing crazy things," Gracie Perez said. Her husband is Perez's older brother, and the families were close, often barbecuing together.

The family hopes to meet some of the children who received Kassie's donations so they can tell them a little about her loving and easygoing outlook.

But for now, Perez is trying to find a way to say goodbye. When he left for Iraq five months ago, he didn't put his family through the emotion of taking him to the airport. His family was a normal family, he said, but closer than most.

Then and now, he said, "It's hard saying goodbye."