Heartache abides in Savanna Stephens. So does her sense of hope and wonder.
The Quaker Valley High School senior is the lone survivor of her family of four. She lost her father to cancer and sister to illness. Three days before Christmas last year, Stephens found her mother Susan murdered in the basement of their Bell Acres home.
She says she has changed since her mother's death. She now is more focused on things that matter.
"I'm not quite sure how I made it this far, but you have to keep going no matter what," said Stephens, 17. "Things can get better. You can be happy if you find the right place."
Stephens now lives in Marshall with attorney Jon Perry, a family friend, and his wife, Joni.
In the past year, Stephens says, she has improved her grades, picking up A's in advanced placement art, music, science ethics and politics. Her worst grade, she says, was a B in English. She dreams of a career as an artist, plays the guitar and drums, and plans to get her driver's license soon.
"She's 17 going on 90," Jon Perry said. "The silly, petty things teens find amusing -- she's not into."
Stephens frequently sifts through old pictures of Charles and Susan Stephens. After her mother died, Stephens found some of her most treasured possessions -- boxes of her father's personal journals.
"I don't know if they can see me, but I try to live my life as if they were watching me," Stephens said about her parents.
Stephens considers the Perrys' two sons, Alex, 11, and Trevor, 8, her brothers. She also considers herself a sibling to a trio of sisters she hardly knew a year ago -- Kara Szymanski, 27, and Erin Szymanski, 25, of Sewickley, and Jesse Riesmeyer, 31, of New Sewickley. She met them while dating their brother.
"I never know how to tell people about Savanna," Kara Szymanski said. "She's more alive than anyone. When you're not happy, she's always there to pick you up."
Born in San Francisco, Stephens and her family had lived on the West Coast, where her father worked as a lighting technician on the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries," before moving to the Pittsburgh area in the mid 1990s to seek better medical treatment for his lung cancer. Charlie Stephens died in 1996.
Susan Stephens went to work at Church Brew Works in Lawrenceville and later as an administrative assistant at WAMO-FM radio to help support her children. She also was a volunteer fundraiser for the McGuire Memorial Home in Daugherty, Beaver County.
Miika Stephens was diagnosed with a brain tumor shortly after the family moved here. An operation at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh in Oakland to remove the tumor had left Miika in a coma. She died in 2002 at the McGuire home. Allegheny County records show Susan Stephens filed a lawsuit against Children's neurosurgery department over her daughter's operation and settled it in November 2002. She was represented by Jon Perry. Documents from that case are sealed.
Following the settlement, Susan Stephens moved to plush Bell Acres, buying a sprawling, ranch-style home abutting Sewickley Heights Golf Club for $400,000 in February 2003. Susan Stephens sold the family's house in Sewickley several months later for $85,000.
Savanna Stephens found her mother's body Dec. 22, 2004, after returning home from her last day of school before Christmas break.
Susan Stephens' boyfriend, Phanthanomn "Tom" Phommaxaysy, 44, a native of Laos, is awaiting trial in the killing. Phommaxaysy apologized to Savanna Stephens in a letter sent several months after the slaying, she said
"I believe him that he's sorry," Stephens said. "I was really close to him. ... I don't hate him, but I'd prefer to not have anything to do with him."
After her mother died, Stephens first moved in with relatives, which didn't work out.
Her mother and Jon Perry had developed a friendship based on his son Trevor's battle with cancer.
Stephens spent a weekend with the Perry family, then asked if Perry was serious about an offer to allow her to stay.
"After she stayed a weekend, we fell in love with her," Jon Perry said. "After the suffering she's been through, why should she miss her senior year?"
A judge has declared John and Joni Perry, both 40, Stephens' legal guardians.
Stephens, who has a room in the basement of the Perry home, quickly bonded with Trevor. His cancer now is in remission.
"It was hard to get used to," Stephens said. "They're the optimist, all-American family, and that's something I haven't been around for a long time."
Stephens is heir to her mother's estate, but won't control the money until she's 21. In the meantime, Stephens is looking for a job and plans to start saving for an apartment.
She's also thinking about getting a tattoo of her father's last journal entry. Stephens believe her father wrote it shortly before his death.
"On this, the morning of departure, feelings of excitement, solitude, and melancholy elude me and I become just a very small part in this living theater," the entry reads. "... Never in my life have I felt such serene calm, like a duck about to break the stillness of a morning pond."
The words resonate with Charles Stephens' daughter.
"I don't have the family that it started out to be," Savanna Stephens said. "On the other hand, I've learned so much about myself the past year -- I wouldn't change that."
