She likes to draw. Keeps a journal. Plays Xbox and basketball. She has a boxer at her mother’s house.
“She loves dogs,” her father Joseph Rocha says. “Absolutely loves them.”
Illyania Rocha begged to spend the night with her older half-sister, Alexis Rocha, at the home on the western outskirts of Springfield where she was attacked. The girls wanted to paint Alexis’ bedroom.
The dog lived at the home. The girls’ father had seen it before and was concerned.
The dog was standoffish, Joseph Rocha recalls. Not friendly.
He says that he gave permission for the sleepover after telling his ex-wife, who is the mother of Alexis, but not Illyania, to keep the dog in a safe place.
“She wanted to stay with her sister so bad – she never gets to do it,” Joseph Rocha said. “I told them: as long as that dog’s locked up. Keep it away.”
Illyania now faces a month, maybe more, at St. John’s Hospital. On Wednesday, she underwent her third surgery since the attack that nearly killed her.
Bites cover her entire body. Her scalp was partially detached. The dog bit through an artery on her left arm.
A main goal of the first two surgeries was to clean out dirt that collected in wounds after the dog attacked and apparently dragged her around a backyard.
Alexis, 15, rescued her sister, Rocha says. She had gone looking for Illyania to go for lunch and a shopping trip. She found her lying in the yard, the dog beside her.
Alexis ran into the house, soaked bath towels in water and covered her sister’s bleeding wounds, which slowed the bleeding, Rocha says, and doctors told him that might well have saved the girl’s life. And then Alexis kept the dog at bay until help arrived.
The dog, according to a sheriff’s report, had previously bitten Alexis seriously enough to leave a lasting mark.
“She kept her down and kept the dog away from her,” Rocha says. “She got a big bruise on her arm from where she smacked the dog to keep it away.”
Rocha, a supervisor at Toys R Us, was at work when he got text messages from Alexis and his ex-wife. You need to get to the hospital immediately. They didn’t say why, but that was all he needed to hear. He blew every traffic light and beat the ambulance to the emergency room. He was there when rescue crews wheeled her inside.
“It’s not really a memory I want to keep,” he says, looking drawn and exhausted in the hospital cafeteria while waiting for his daughter to emerge from her third surgery.
After five hours of surgery on the day of the attack, Illyania was placed on a ventilator and heavy sedation. She remained that way for a week. Doctors had to restrain her because she would thrash her arms while asleep. Nurses are doing what they can to keep her from looking down at her wounds.
The Great Dane named Merlin, died after being tased three times by sheriff’s deputies, one of whom was bitten while trying to get the animal under control.
The husband of Rocha’s ex-wife told deputies that the dog, which had lived at the house for about a year, was vicious and that “everyone is afraid of him.”
The state Department of Children and Family Services is investigating to determine whether adults inappropriately allowed Illyania to come into contact with the dog. The state’s attorney’s office is also considering charges.
Is Joseph Rocha angry at anyone?
“Mostly myself, because I said yeah, you can stay with your sister,” he answers. “That’s just the way it works.”
(Illinois Times - April 23, 2015)
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