HOW TO HELP

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SPRING LAKE, MI -- Sharon and Tim Ponce were watching the 11 o’clock news when they learned their great-niece had been mauled by a pet raccoon.

Three-month-old Charlotte was in critical condition in the hospital. The raccoon had chewed away her right ear, her nose and part of her lip and cheekbone. Charlotte’s 15-month old brother, Marshall, had been taken from the home and placed in a foster care facility.

Sharon and Tim looked at each other and said “Oh, my God,” Sharon recalled. “Our faith means a lot to us. We had lost a child to crib death. We knew what it was like. I think we had a heart to take care of a baby that needed help.”

The Ponces (pronounced Pon-say) contacted the children’s birth mom and her grandparents and offered to serve as temporary foster parents as the authorities investigated.

That was in 2002. Since then, Charlotte has grown into a high-spirited 10-year-old girl who loves swimming, fishing and riding horses. And the Ponces, once temporary guardians, are now Mom and Dad to Charlotte and her brother Marshall, now 11. They adopted the children and raised them along with their older sons, Luke, 28, and Aaron, 24.

The Ponces have nursed Charlotte through the intense days of recovery from her injuries and through countless surgeries since then. And now they are preparing for a series of operations to rebuild Charlotte’s nose, ear and lip.

“It’s been a big journey,” said Tim Ponce, a 61-year-old production worker at Hillshire Farms who is on temporary disability. “I love her a lot. Every time she comes out of the operating room, I have tears in my eyes.”

“She’s my hero,” said Sharon, 52. “We just love her – that’s all. Like anybody who has adopted a child, they’re yours.”

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There was a time when the Ponces weren’t sure they were up the challenge of caring for Charlotte. When she was released from the hospital two months after the attack, Charlotte was on a feeding tube and needed breathing treatments. Sharon panicked the first night as she struggled to hook up the feeding tube.

She called a friend from church, who is a nurse, and the friend came over, calmed her down and helped her through it.

Even more difficult, however, was listening to tiny Charlotte’s heartbreaking cries at night.

“I had never heard a baby cry like that. My hair would stand up on my arms,” Sharon said. “It was like she was reliving it over and over again.”

And when Charlotte cried, her brother Marshall cried, too.

“He would wake up and say, ‘Is Charlotte OK? Is Charlotte OK?’ It was a long time before he wasn’t hanging on me all the time,” Sharon said.

Charlotte Ponce to get facial reconstruction 10 Gallery: Charlotte Ponce to get facial reconstruction

The Ponces’ involvement in the children’s lives caused a family rift, Sharon said. She and her older brother are no longer on speaking terms.

Her brother is the father of the children’s birth mother. When the attack happened, the children were living with their 18-year-old mother and 23-year-old father in an apartment in a pole barn behind the grandparents’ home.

The police said the children were left alone at the time of the attack. They said the birth parents gave several different accounts about the amount of time the children were unsupervised and how much access the pet raccoon had to the home.

Although the birth mother sought to regain custody of the children, the court terminated parental rights in 2004. The Ponces adopted Charlotte and Marshall after an appeal was turned down in 2005. They didn’t make a big fuss over the adoption, because they knew the birth family opposed it.

Charlotte was 3 then. At that time, she underwent her first facial surgery to repair scars on her cheeks. After the operation, “she looked like somebody had hit her with a baseball bat,” Sharon said. “Her face was bruised. She had restraints on her arms.

“Any pity I felt for them (the birth parents) went pfft. Sorry, but this little girl should not have to put up with this.”

In raising Charlotte, Sharon said she and her husband have followed the advice they received from a doctor at DeVos Children’s Hospital when they first brought her home. The doctor told them, “Treat her like a normal kid.”

“She’s in public school. We always take her out,” Sharon said. “That’s why she’s thrived – because she’s well loved. And like everybody else, she’s a little stinker sometimes.”

At times, Sharon has been amazed by how confident Charlotte is. She recalls a day when they were in an Ann Arbor shopping mall about four years ago and she noticed a lot of people staring at Charlotte.

“It really bothered me,” Sharon said. “It seemed more than usual. I thought maybe we needed to talk about this. I said to her, ‘Do the stares bother you?’

“She said, ‘No, I like going up and down stairs.’”

About a year and a half ago, the family moved from Muskegon to Spring Lake, and Charlotte had to switch schools. The staff at her new school, Edgewood Elementary in Fruitport, did a good job preparing the students for their new classmate, and Charlotte was warmly welcomed.

“The first day of school, you would have thought she was Angelina Jolie,” Sharon said. “Everyone was saying hi.”

Still, Sharon said Charlotte recently has started to become self-conscious, keeping her head down and hesitating to connect with other kids. And there are moments when she is in public that children see her and become frightened.

That’s why Sharon is glad Charlotte can undergo reconstructive surgery before she hits middle school and her teen years. The Beaumont Hospital plastic surgeon who will do the operation doesn't promise perfection, but Sharon said she is impressed by the results he has achieved in other cases.

“She’s going to look pretty darn good,” Sharon said. “She may have a scar here or there, but she’s going to look a whole lot better.”

At a spaghetti dinner fundraiser July 27 in Muskegon, the Ponces met a Ravenna firefighter who was on duty the night Charlotte was attacked by the raccoon. He said it was "the worst call by far" that he ever handled.

“It was a miracle she survived,” he told them.

Sharon sees only one explanation: “That little girl has a purpose.”

At the time the Ponces began caring for Charlotte and Marshall, their youngest son was 14 and they thought they would be empty-nesters in a few years. But they say they have no regrets about welcoming the children into their family.

“It’s a sacrifice, but we can’t imagine our lives any other way,” Sharon said.

Email Sue Thoms at sthoms1@mlive.com and follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/suethoms

