AUBURN – It was supposed to be a fun evening ride.

The Legere family had made the trip before, clomping down Route 117 in one of Phil Trundy’s pony carts. All three of the Legere girls – Grace, 9, Sarah, 8, and Deanna, 7 – loved the miniature horses. Grace was especially smitten.

Adopted from Romania with her sisters, Grace learned confidence around horses. Trust. They helped her come out of her shell. Parents Bill and Teresa Legere made sure she was around them as much as possible.

So on a recent Monday, the girls paid their weekly visit to Trundy’s Buckfield farm. They brushed the horses and slipped them into their harnesses. Sarah took out one cart with her mother, trotting the horses ahead because she liked to go fast. Trundy drove the second, sauntering behind with Grace sitting on one side of him and Deanna on the other. The sun was setting.

“Mr. Phil said, ‘What a nice day,'” recalled Deanna. “After that I don’t know what else happened. That’s probably when the accident happened.”

A commercial pickup truck rear-ended the cart carrying Trundy, Grace and Deanna. Trundy and Deanna were seriously hurt.

Grace was killed.

Nearly four weeks later, the family is struggling to deal with the loss. But as they grieve, they’re also working on a way to ensure their daughter’s death – and life – helps other adoptive children.

Adoption option

Bill and Teresa were high school sweethearts. He was 17 and a student at Calvary Christian Academy in Turner; she was 15 and a student at Jay High School. They met at church and instantly clicked.

“It was one of those connections,” Bill said. “We were right for each other.”

They both went to the University of Southern Maine to study health care, and married soon after graduation. They went to work in the emergency room at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston. A year later, they decided to have a baby.

Seven years later, that baby still hadn’t come.

“We went through a lot of fertility stuff. It just wasn’t happening for us,” Teresa said.

In 2000, they began going on mission trips to Romania, where they met Sarah, 3 months old and named Saveta, squeezed into an abandoned baby unit at a state hospital. Her older sister, Grace, a toddler named Onorica, was alone in a room next door. In an institution with many babies and few adults, the girls got little attention, stimulation or love.

Bill and Teresa had always considered adoption. Looking at Romania’s orphans, at those two little girls, it became a serious option.

“It was really a soul-searching trip,” Bill said. “We’re like, ‘Do we want to have a baby or do we want to be parents?'”

The Legeres left Romania and returned in 2001 to find the girls had been moved to a private orphanage where the Legeres were volunteering. They learned a third sister, Daianna (now Deanna), had been born.

“Then it started to be, ‘Oh my. What are we going to do about this? Are we going to come back here every year and watch them grow up or is this the moment we make the decision?'” Bill said.

In January 2002, they started the process to bring the children home.

Grace

Compared to the state-run hospital, the private orphanage was a blessing for the girls. It provided physical therapy for the youngest, who’d been laid on her side so often and for so long that her neck muscles couldn’t hold her head up straight. It provided a foster home where the children could learn to function in a family.

Bill and Teresa slowly got to know the girls who would become their daughters. Home videos show the family playing with bubbles, the youngest taking a doughnut from Bill.

As the adoption neared, the Legeres’ Romanian friends begged them to change the oldest girl’s name, saying “Onorica” was too ugly and old-fashioned. Bill and Teresa chose the name Grace.

“It was so clear that they were a gift we were meant to have. Her name was so befitting of her,” Bill said.

On Nov. 15, 2002, Bill, Teresa, Grace, Sarah and Deanna came home to Auburn.

Grace was a stubborn pre-schooler, reluctant to trust adults, but a loving mother hen to her sisters and all other young children. Sarah was a smart, energetic toddler who always had to see what the commotion was about. Deanna was a beautiful, bright-eyed baby.

It took months for family members to understand each other. The Legeres knew basic Romanian (words for eat, drink, bathroom and sleep), but gestures had to fill in the blanks. Their days were hectic, their nights sleepless. But for the couple who had never had children, there was really only one big surprise.

“Just how quickly we fell in love with them,” Bill said.

Eventually, Teresa left her job at CMMC to be a stay-at-home mom. She home-schooled the trio after Grace tried kindergarten at a local Christian school.

“We worked so hard to get them, I said, ‘Why am I giving them away eight hours a day?'”

The family spent every day together. The sisters kept the strong bond they’d formed as orphans in Romania – though Grace learned she didn’t have to be her little sisters’ caretaker anymore.

“I think it was almost a relief to her,” Bill said.

Horses seemed to help the transition. Grace delighted in the huge animals and gained confidence when she worked with them. The family took spring trips to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Grace loved to watch the wild horses play on the beach. Bill and Teresa took the girls to a Buckfield stable, where they learned to ride.

When that stable closed, the girls began visiting Trundy’s miniature horses.

‘Where are my girls?’

Grace, Sarah and Deanna went to Trundy’s Buckfield farm once a week, trading chores – barn-painting, horse-grooming and animal care – for horse time. Sometimes the girls would ride. Sometimes they would lead the horses around. Other times, they would go out with Trundy in his pony carts.

That’s what they did on Monday, June 2.

Sarah and her mother went up Route 117, then headed back to Trundy’s North Hill Road farm. They didn’t worry when they didn’t see Trundy’s cart again. They figured he, Grace and Deanna had gone a different way.

Soon after they got back to the farm, the phone rang. There had been an accident.

Panicked, Teresa was out the door and in the car before she learned where the accident was. She followed a passing firetruck, figuring it was heading where she wanted to go. She was right.

At the scene, she ran toward emergency workers, yelling, “Where are my girls?” A woman would only tell her that one of her daughters had been injured and was being taken to CMMC. She wouldn’t say how badly injured.

Teresa, a former ER nurse, knew what that reluctance meant. Her daughter was in trouble.

At the same time, Bill got home from his shift as a nurse practitioner in CMMC’s ER. He was eating dinner when the phone rang.

A paramedic told him to get back to the hospital.

At the ER, Bill and Teresa stood by as co-workers – the same people who’d given them an adoption shower, who watched the girls grow up – tried to resuscitate Grace. She never responded.

Exactly five years, six months and 19 days after they brought her home, Bill and Teresa said goodbye.

“It’s OK to go,” Teresa told her. “If you need to go with Jesus, it’s OK.”

In Grace’s honor

Bill asked a co-worker, a fellow nurse, to watch over his little girl’s body. Then he and Teresa rushed to the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital in Portland.

Deanna, their youngest, had also been injured in the crash. She’d been flown to Maine Medical Center with a fractured skull.

Deanna had been awake and talking after the crash. She was stable, but part of her skull had been pushed perilously close to her brain. Doctors had to operate.

Nearly four weeks after the accident, Deanna is doing well. She wears her hair pulled back to hide the shaved patch on the side of her head, but she suffered no other broken bones, no internal injuries, no brain damage. She doesn’t remember the crash at all.

Trundy is still recovering. The Legeres have spoken to him, but haven’t yet returned to the farm. They don’t blame him or anyone else for the accident.

According to Sgt. Tim Ontengco of the Oxford County Sheriff’s Department, the crash remains under investigation.

The Legere girls are trying to deal with the loss of their big sister. Sometimes Deanna disappears and Bill or Teresa will find her alone in a room crying. Sarah talks about the accident, about Grace, every night.

“She says, ‘I just want to see her one more time alive,'” Bill said.

He and Teresa are trying to deal, too.

“You just don’t sleep when these things happen,” Bill said.

They’ve gotten a lot of support – prayers, food and notes of condolence – and they say that support has helped. In appreciation, they recently wrote open thank-you letters to the East Auburn Baptist Church and CMMC, but “for us, it doesn’t feel like enough,” Teresa said.

They wanted to thank everyone publicly.

They also wanted to do something in Grace’s honor.

The family has started the Foundation for Hope and Grace, a charity that will provide grants to families who adopt children from overseas. The grants will help pay for a parent’s leave of absence, for therapeutic horseback riding or for any other help a family needs to adjust to an adoption. The charity will also give grants to organizations that help overseas orphans, such as the private orphanage where Grace and her sisters stayed.

“If we’d never had the chance to adopt, then Grace would be just another 9-year-old girl in an orphanage and we’d just be two people without kids,” Teresa said.

So far, the foundation has $6,000. The family has filed to make it a nonprofit.

They believe Grace would have been happy with the idea.

“She would have loved it,” Teresa said. “She was always one for the underdog.”