Couple hit by falling tree near Asti remain in ICU

A Sebastopol couple remained hospitalized Thursday in the intensive care unit at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital as friends and neighbors rallied around the two small children who escaped injury when a tree fell in front of their family car, injuring both parents.

Kiko Taganashi, 42, remained in serious condition Thursday with severe chest trauma suffered when he was impaled on 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 thought might heal without surgery, her mother, Linda Sumner, said.

They were hurt Tuesday evening on Highway 101 near Asti, maybe 10 minutes after the family left 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 or 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 luckily spared the couple's two children, 7-year-old Arthur, a first-grader at Apple Blossom Elementary School, and 3-year-old Fiona.

At home with her grandchildren Thursday, their grandmother 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."

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@press

democrat.com.