Feeling Jesica's story

The ordeal of Jesica Santillan, the Mexican girl who died of a botched heart-lung transplant at Duke University last year, gripped writer Nancy Rommelmann like few stories do. It might have been that Jesica resembled her own teenage daughter, or it might have been something even deeper. She got on a plane and the cover story in today's LA Weekly fills in the rest.

While the origin of my obsession may have been a thing as random as appearance � the tawny skin and almond eyes and babyish nose were the same as my daughter�s � nurturing the fixation gave birth to something less simple, a launching pad I used to catapult myself into Jesica�s posthumous life.

My flying to North Carolina, to stay with Mack Mahoney, to meet Jesica�s family, to discuss her case with lawyers may have happened because I�m a writer who tends toward immersion journalism. It may have been driven by career ambitions; I boarded the plane with a verbal agreement to write a book about Jesica. It may have been that my obsession simply swept me overboard. My mother said Jesica�s tragedy sucked me in because she had a face, and we know that a news story with a face, whether it�s Willie Horton�s or Laci Peterson�s, incites emotional involvement.

These reasons were true, but ultimately ancillary: I flew to North Carolina because my fixation caused a puncture wound I could not stem alone, there was too much empathy flowing, it needed someplace to go. I no longer felt like a compassionate stranger in Jesica�s tragedy, but a participant.

Also in the Weekly: Nikki Finke on the Disney-Comcast "brat brawl," and Marc Cooper interviews Pentagon whistleblower Karen Kwiatkowski.