Local teacher hurt after tree falls on car

A Sebastopol couple remained in the intensive care unit Thursday at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital as friends and neighbors rallied to care for their two small children, who escaped injury when a tree fell on the family car.

Kiko Taganashi, 42, remained in serious condition Thursday with severe chest trauma suffered when he was impaled by a branch of the tree that fell Tuesday night, a hospital spokeswoman said.

His wife, Amy Wegener-Taganashi, a teacher at Cinnabar Elementary School in Petaluma, was in fair condition with a broken neck that doctors said might heal without surgery, said her mother, Linda Sumner.

They were hurt Tuesday evening on Highway 101 near Asti about 10 minutes after leaving Sumner’s Cloverdale home following a memorial service for her husband, Lonny, who died May 13.

Wegener-Taganashi later told her mother she saw the tree as it fell but there was no time for her husband, who was driving, to react.

The tree struck the right front of their Pontiac SUV, then crashed through the windshield.

Taganashi, a graphic artist, suffered several puncture wounds and required extensive surgery, Sumner said.

But he and his wife “are getting better every day,” she said, and the impact spared the couple’s two children, Arthur, 7, a first-grader at Apple Blossom Elementary School, and Fiona, 3.

At home with her grandchildren Thursday, Sumner said they were doing well and that she was overwhelmed by a community “that’s just enveloping them,” supporting the family and making sure Arthur gets “to all his baseball games and all kinds of stuff.”

“We went from one horrendous experience to another horrendous experience,” she said, referring to her husband’s death and then the crash.

“If you read the newspaper every day, you think the world is a horrible place,” Sumner said. “Something like this happens and you realize everybody is wonderful.”