Struggles can't break life-saving bond girls share

In that summer of their childhood, Christine Evans was 9 and Lashanda McKenzie 13.

The girls were distant cousins and friends. Evans livedwith her mother and brother in Central Islip. McKenzie, from the small South Carolina town of Lake City, came to Long Island to visit her relatives.

On July 16, 1998, a Thursday, their relationship changed from carefree days of bike riding and playing Double Dutch jump rope to something more profound:It was the day McKenzie became a savior.

"She hurt herself to save me," Evans said this week, adding later, "She saved my life."

As Evans recalls, they and about eight other kids rode their bikes to a nearby apartment complex to go to the pool. On the way home, the group took a shortcut across Long Island Rail Road tracks east of the Central Islip station - and that is when tragedy struck.

McKenzie made it across easily. But Evans' bicycle fell, hitting the second rail and the electrified third rail, and becoming a lethal contraption.

Explosions erupted.

"My legs, my arm, a piece of my stomach was burning," said Evans, now 22.

McKenzie ran to help. "It was 'Boom! boom! boom!' I just remember pushing her out of the fire," said McKenzie, now 26. "I pushed her hard."

The other kids took off to get Evans' mother. Evans, on fire, ran down the street, trying to flag down cars.A neighborhood woman grabbed a pot of water and came running. Someone threw her on the ground.

"It just felt like I was cooking, my legs," Evans said. "No amount of water could soothe it."

Evans had second-degree burns on her stomach and arms. Her legs had third-degree burns.

McKenzie suffered second- and third-degree burns on her hand and second-degree burns elsewhere.

"I didn't realize I was in danger," McKenzie said. "She was getting hurt, and I had to do something to help her."

At the hospital, doctors used tweezers to pull burned skin from Evans' legs. She had to learn to walk again, and still has scars.

Just last year, Evans again began to wear shorts.She sued the LIRR for negligence, settling for $100,000 in 2004, said her attorney, Frederick K. Brewington.

"It took a while for me to get over everything that happened," said Evans, who works as a receptionist and as a house monitor at a homeless shelter. "Some people go through bad things to get a blessing so maybe that was my blessing. What I went through, I know it's a plan for my life. I should have been dead."

To Evans, and her godmother Laruth Henry, someone has been watching out for this child for a long time.

Her mother, Jill Brock, had lupus and when she got pregnant with Evans, people told her to have an abortion. Brock intended to do that, said Henry, who marshaled her own prayers and those of others.

Brock kept the baby. When Evans was born prematurely, just over one pound, Brock gave her the middle name Fayth.

"She felt through the faith of Christ that was the only way Christine would survive," said Evans' father, Charles Edward Evans, 50, of Central Islip.

After the incident on the railroad tracks and her painful recovery, Evans faced more challenges. She dropped out of high school to care for her ailing mother, who died when she was 16. Later, she got her general equivalency diploma.

She said her faith has kept her going, as has Henry, her "Auntie" with whom she has lived for years.

McKenzie's path, too, has seen trouble. She hooked up with a bad crowd and had brushes with the law, she said. She has two kids, recently separated from her husband and is unemployed, bouncing from home to home.

"I'm just trying to raise my kids and start my life over," she said during a phone interview. "I am struggling."

The last time the two saw each other was two years ago. Still, they care for each other.

"I know if I called her, she would do anything for me," McKenzie said.

"Hearing the name Lashanda makes me think of her saving my life," Evans said. "I can never repay what she did."