By BILL LODGE / The Dallas Morning News

Monday, May 1, 2006

Misty Davila's heart continues to beat 13 months after her husband bludgeoned her with a baseball bat.

That heart and other organs saved the lives of a young Pilot Point man and three other people then.

Sunday, three of Ms. Davila's four children gathered to meet with heart transplant patient Chris Lindsay at Hotel Intercontinental in Dallas.

"I've got their mother's heart in me, so I feel I should be a part of their lives now," said Mr. Lindsay, 22.

Ms. Davila's children live with Kim and Randal Moore of Carrollton. Ms. Moore was 33-year-old Ms. Davila's aunt.

"I'm sure we will" merge into a larger family, Ms. Moore said as Mr. Lindsay spoke with the three children - 14-year-old Tony Hampton, 13-year-old Allison Hampton and 7-year-old Trinity Davila.

Robert Davila, Ms. Davila's 41-year-old husband, leaped to his death from an interstate overpass the day of his wife's killing in March 2005. Their two daughters told police that Mr. Davila beat their mother and then left their house in his pickup.

Mr. Lindsay, who received his first pacemaker when he was 12, was in desperate condition that same day.

The young man said he suffered from congestive heart failure brought on by muscular dystrophy and would not have lived much longer without a transplant.

Now, he shares an interest with Tony in restored muscle cars from the 1960s and 1970s.

"I can do a full tune-up on my mom's Suburban," Tony volunteered.

Larry Denison, Mr. Lindsay's stepfather, told Ms. Davila's relatives that she and other organ donors should be considered a level above professional athletes and movie stars.

"At the time that this happened, we knew that as we were rejoicing, someone else was grieving," Mr. Denison said.

"They're heroes," he said of Ms. Davila's family. "If not for them, we obviously would have gone to a funeral."

Allison, who likes to be called "Alley," was the family member who informed surgeons at Parkland Memorial Hospital that her mother wanted to donate her organs.

"That's what my Mama wanted," she said.

Surgeons at St. Paul University Hospital completed the transplant.

"I'm alive," Mr. Lindsay said in a whisper. "I just wanted to know how their mother was ... things about her. She was beautiful, a nice lady."

"Misty was a get-things-done type of girl," said her brother, Michael Martin of Lindale, Texas. "I was real glad that someone lived because of her death."

"This shows people why it's important to donate," said Pam Silvestri of Dallas-based Southwest Transplant Alliance, which matches potential donor organs with patients who need those organs.

A North Texas woman received Ms. Davila's liver, Ms. Silvestri said. A North Texas man received her left kidney and pancreas, and another man who now lives outside the U.S. received her right kidney.

Fifty patients can benefit from a fatally injured person's internal organs, skin, long bones, joints, corneas, intestines, ligaments and tendons, Ms. Silvestri said.

The bonds built between families affected by transplants can last.

As television camera crews left their hotel room, Mr. Lindsay and Tony huddled over a model of a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1.