THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411130040
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
Fleeing from the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 taught Rozsa Parker the cost of freedom at an age when most American girls are more concerned with Barbie dolls and Brownies.
Parker was 9 when her mother and father gathered their four children in Budapest for a midnight escape from the Red Army's Hungarian reign of terror, which crushed one of Eastern Europe's first experiments in Western-style government.
They made their way to safety and freedom in Virginia. But that experience, plus growing up in a war-torn, underdeveloped part of Europe, left Parker with more than traumatic memories of brutality and near-capture.
It also eroded her health, giving her tuberculosis that damaged her lungs, and starting the cardiac disease that her family thinks contributed to her death last week in Virginia Beach.
The 48-year-old Parker was found dead in the Hampton city landfill on Wednesday after a garbage truck deposited her body while unloading rubbish from Virginia Beach. The state medical examiner said Thursday that Parker died from being accidentally crushed in the back of the collection truck.
Police said they believe Parker fell into a Dumpster in
the parking lot of Bayside Presbyterian Church at Ewell Road and Independence Boulevard in Virginia Beach.
She suffered her fatal injuries, they believe, when the collection truck emptied the Dumpster and crushed what it contained.
Police ruled her death as accidental and said she probably ended up in the Dumpster while practicing her habit of rummaging through garbage.
Those suggestions have wounded members of Parker's family, who say she was a kind but sickly person who was helping remove tree limbs at the church when she probably suffered a heart attack or had a diabetic reaction. The health emergency, they say, resulted in her falling unconscious into the Dumpster.
Family members say tree limbs from the church were found at the Hampton landfill and prove their version of what happened. They believe Parker probably climbed into the Dumpster to push the limbs into it when she suffered her attack.
``It just seems like such a horrible and tragic death to go through,'' said Bonnie Parker, Rozsa Parker's 28-year-old daughter.
``And then, on top of that, for them to make her seem like some kind of homeless trash lady who lived in a Dumpster. That just isn't true.''
Bonnie Parker said that her mother did scavenge plants and flowers from Dumpsters for a time. But she said her mother had not done any scavenging since she joined Bayside Presbyterian and started working to help homeless people.
``At one time, a lot of my friends and her friends went through Dumpsters,'' said Parker, who has a brother and two sisters. ``But she had not done it for well over a year.''
Parker said that police probably got the idea of her mother's habit of scavenging from several unfriendly neighbors who lived near her on Theodorus Court in Virginia Beach.
``They just didn't like my mother very much,'' Parker said.
Her mother's health, Parker said, had deteriorated steadily during the past few years, requiring heavy medication for treatment of several serious health conditions.
But the medical problems, Parker said, never got her mother down.
``My mother was a trouper,'' Parker said. ``She was one of those people who never, ever, gave up on anything. It didn't matter how sick the doctors told her she was, she was going to do it.''
Parker's death was the third in Hampton Roads in 19 months attributed to accidental crushing in a garbage-collection truck.
On July 22, the body of Jimmy L. Williams, 43, was discovered at the Newport News landfill. And last year, in March, the body of John E. Lewis, 51, of Suffolk was found in the Southeastern Public Service Authority trash-processing plant on Victory Boulevard in Portsmouth.
Jeff Southard, a spokesman for Browning-Ferris Industries, which owned the garbage-collection truck in which Parker was found, admitted that scavenging in Dumpsters does occur.
He said Dumpster security is the responsibility of the property owner where the Dumpster is placed. Some property owners lock Dumpsters to keep people out, but it's not routinely done, he said.
Despite the recent incidents, Southard said, ``scavenging resulting in injury or death (is not) a problem.''
``It is a pretty rare occurrence,'' Southard said. ``I have been with the company for six years and I have heard of something like that happening on only one or two or three occasions.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
KEYWORDS: ACCIDENT GENERAL FATALITY by CNB