Family mourns 'Baby Girl'

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Staff Writer

Karin and Lon Williams say Alacia's room is exactly as she left it. The Ma'ili girl, 10, died last week in an accident on Farrington Highway that also killed an HPD officer. Photos by Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

A Williams family portrait is surrounded by flowers, Alacia's hat, her favorite plate and several of the academic awards the girl received from Ma'ili Elementary School, where she was an honor student.

How to help Collection funds to help the Williams family have been set up all over the country. In Hawai'i, donations may be made to Friends of Alacia, in care of any Bank of Hawaii branch. Funeral services are pending, with planning expected to be completed today.

It's all exactly as the 10-year-old youngster left it a week ago today, when she died in a fiery crash that also killed Honolulu police motorcycle officer Ryan Goto on Farrington Highway near Honokai Hale.

"Her sister doesn't want anything touched," said Alacia's mother, Karin Williams, who, with her husband, Lon, spoke publicly yesterday for the first time about their younger daughter, a child better known to an adoring neighborhood as "Baby Girl."

Karin Williams, a 45-year-old certified nurse assistant in a local nursing home, was taking her daughter on a Girl Scout outing when she swerved to avoid a box on the road that had fallen from a truck. Her vehicle was struck by another car and propelled into the path of the oncoming HPD motorcycle unit.

She's home recuperating after several days in the hospital, comforted by an outpouring of love and support that has overwhelmed the family.

"We had a gathering on Sunday and the whole neighborhood turned out," she said. "We thought it was going to be a tear-jerker, but it was everybody talking about Baby Girl, stories we never heard, like people finding her slippers in their mailbox. I bought about a pair a week."

As the Williams family begins to face a difficult future, they are finding hope in memories and a sense of peace, not anger, that they were lucky to have known their rambunctious, unusual child. And when the house is too quiet, as it is now, they turn on the radio to fill the silence.

Even in preschool in Germany — Alacia's birthplace — when every other child was sleeping, Alacia was up playing by the front door, sitting at a typewriter. She walked early, talked early and taught herself to read in preschool, often sitting and reading to other children.

"She was more or less figuring out what the pictures meant," said her 36-year-old father, whose finger she caught hold of and held onto just after she was born.

Close to her sister

Eleven years separated the two half sisters, but Alacia was close to 21-year-old Shalom, even though she pestered her big sister relentlessly.

"She volunteered her sister for a lot of things," said their mother. "Her sister would be asleep on Saturday morning and she'd go in and say 'Hey, hey, you gotta do my hair.

"And Shalom just got this glow-in-the-dark bubble bath and she let Baby Girl use a little bit and the next thing you know, half the bottle's gone. And her sister was saying 'Ohhh, you're gonna get it.' But the next thing you know, she's taking her to the mall. What kind of punishment is that? But you couldn't stay mad at her. They came back with a little make-up, a new shirt and her first bra."

Karin and Lon Williams have never been scolders. Instead of getting angry, Alacia's father set the standard when she was little by explaining in long words that she ought not to behave badly or cry.

"Instead of saying 'Don't cry,' it was 'Please don't be discomforted,'" he said. "Or 'This is unacceptable, and we shouldn't have this conduct.' And Alacia would sit there and take this in and then use it on other people."

As a multiracial couple — Karin is Caucasian and German-born, and Lon is black — the Williamses believed it was especially important to instill in their children that all people are equal.

"She didn't see color," her mother said of Alacia. "She was beyond that. It was just another girl she was playing with."

She stood up for underdogs, and when a neighbor child came home from chemotherapy treatments for cancer, it was Baby Girl who visited her as she recuperated.

It was also Alacia who pushed her parents into activities. She encouraged her mom to help as a Girl Scout volunteer, and in Europe, her outgoing spirit prompted her dad to work at her preschool.

"The next thing you know I'm putting in shelves and barbecuing," he said.

Alacia and her father invented characters to fill their household, including an imaginary brother named Thomas, a new puppy named GiGi and any number of other pets. In his extended periods away from the family — his job took him to Europe in the past year — he would talk to Alacia each morning and evening by cell phone, getting reports on the imaginary menagerie.

"Hello, Father," she'd greet him in her most grown-up voice, sometimes with an Irish accent she was aiming to perfect.

While Alacia was proud of her father's accomplishments as a football player in Europe, and a recent honor he received from the commander in chief of Naval Operations Europe, she also recently pointed out that she had something to be proud of, too — a report card with straight A's. Last year, she was on the honor roll at Ma'ili Elementary.

Since Alacia's death, the Williams family has looked for signs that she is OK.

When the neighborhood children came to pay their respects, Karin Williams watched a gust of wind scatter their carefully arranged Pokeman cards into a heap on a backyard table. She knew Alacia was nearby.

"Those are the things Baby Girl would do," she said. "She'd go by and go 'poof.' "

Lon Williams had to rush home from Pittsburgh, where he'd been in school as part of his Verizon job on a military contract, after hearing of his daughter's death. As he waited at the airport for his flight, a white feather appeared from out of nowhere and landed at his feet.

He remembered that in the Harry Potter books that his daughter loved, "the first trick when you get to heaven is work with feathers. ... I can imagine Alacia getting that book and saying 'Hey, I can do tricks.' "

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.