Holiday Glee Crashes Down In Boy's Death

Route 50 Accident Killed Eager Fairfax 8-Year-Old

Piles of unopened Christmas presents are still stacked under the tree. The colored lights and plastic Santa Claus on the porch have been dark for days.

Sender and Lesbia Salguero rushed to the hospital on Christmas Eve when they learned that their younger son, 8-year-old Ivan, had been struck by a car. Ivan died Christmas morning.

The couple, who spent yesterday preparing for their son's funeral, haven't been back to their Fairfax County home since. They can't bear to see the colorful boxes that left Ivan so excited that he begged to open them early.

"I think it was going to be one of his best Christmases ever, the way he was feeling," a tearful Sender Salguero said yesterday as he sat on a couch at his sister's house. "Saturday night, he separated his gifts from his brother's gifts. He told my dad he got 16. We're not rich -- just little gifts from the dollar store just so he could see stuff under the tree."

Ivan was with his 11-year-old brother, Christian, their cousin and a friend on Sunday afternoon playing football. Just before 6 p.m., it was time to head back and get ready for a big dinner. Then they'd go to church for Christmas Eve Mass.

The boys crossed the westbound lanes of Lee Jackson Memorial Highway, or Route 50, in the Fair Oaks area when traffic was stopped at a red light, Fairfax County police said. Christian and the others stopped in the grassy median when the light turned green, but Ivan ran into the path of a 1993 Ford Mustang traveling east.

Police said the driver, a 28-year-old Burke area man, was not speeding and was not under the influence of alcohol. It was, they said, an accident.

Sender Salguero said he can't imagine life without the little boy who loved his PlayStation 2, his mother's chicken pasta dish and frequent trips to Chuck E. Cheese's. The family lives in Chantilly and owns an auto body shop in Manassas. Ivan would hang out there on Saturdays. He was too small to work on cars, but he'd hold the tools and pretend.

"He used to tell my brother: 'When I'm 18, I'm not going to college. I'm going to take over the auto body place, and you'll work for me,' " Ivan's uncle Vinicio Salguero recalled.

Family members said Ivan was so excited about Christmas that he had been counting down the days. On Saturday, he was allowed to open one small present: some candy.

One recent day, Salguero and his sons went shopping because the boys wanted to surprise their mother for Christmas. Ivan and Christian found a warm coat, perfume and some high-heeled boots. "I'm not much of a shopping man," Salguero said. "All of the eight years, that was the only time I went to the mall with the two boys."

Ivan -- his first name is Sender but he always went by his middle name -- was in the third grade at Greenbriar East Elementary School. Christian is a sixth-grader at the school.

Christian Salguero has spoken little about the accident, his father said.

But he posted his brother's picture, set amid a blue sky and doves, on his MySpace page and described what he witnessed that night.

"He thought he was going to make it to the other side, so he tried to make a run for it, but the car was going too fast," Christian wrote. "I tried to get him, but it was too late. The car had hit him, his shoes went flying in the air."

Ivan was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital by helicopter, but doctors said his brain had been damaged. About midnight, the family decided to disconnect machines helping him breathe.

On his MySpace page, Christian said goodbye to his brother.

"Every day of my life I will remember you," he wrote. "I wont have my lil bro to play video games with, to fight over the computer, to go to grandmas house and go to macdonalds and to share all those wonderful moments that we lived together."