One in an occasional series on how families of slain police officers cope with the wrenching loss.

On the morning of Friday, Sept. 5, the year holds promise for Jazmin Nazario.

It is the third day of classes and she likes her teachers. She's the 10th-grade class representative on student council. She's made honor roll for as long as she can remember, plans to maintain her perfect record, and, in April, when she turns 16, she and her mom are going to the Caribbean. Aruba or Barbados.

She is as optimistic as any teenage girl can be.

The night before, she slept at her grandmother's house in North Philadelphia because her mother, Isabel, a police officer on the Narcotics Strike Force, had to work the night shift. After school, Jazmin waits outside. Her mother pulls up in their red Ford Escape. Her grandmother Pat Santiago has come along. Pat is retiring soon to Mayagüez in Puerto Rico, where she is having a house built. She lived there before moving to New Jersey in the 1960s to raise her two daughters. Every summer the family goes back to soak up the warmth.

They head home, a three-bedroom townhouse in the Northeast. Before her parents divorced, the Nazarios lived in Juniata. After the split, Jazmin and her mother moved in with Pat for eight years. Two years ago, Isabel used her savings to buy a home for the two of them.

"For most of my life, she was my mother and my father," Jazmin says. She and Isabel have grown very close.

They quarrel, of course. Her mother scolds, "Stop spending so much time on the computer!" And when Jazmin takes too long dressing, her mother lectures her on punctuality. But they always make up.

Not yet so deep into the adolescent fugue, Jazmin still adores Isabel. She loves watching her mother dance to salsa and merengue. And she feels respected. "Even though I am young and inexperienced," Jazmin says, her mother turns to her for advice. "She is beautiful," she says. "A diva, but with simple taste."

Earlier that week, her mother had cut her hair short. When her mom's fiance, Carlos Buitrago, confessed that he preferred it long, Jazmin defended her. "You look beautiful regardless of what haircut you get," she said.

Jazmin likes Carlos but even so, her mother has been very cautious. Two years ago, after their first date, Isabel refused to let Carlos into the house. Although they were both police officers and had worked together, she didn't want him to meet her daughter until she was sure she could trust him.

A week before school starts, Isabel has news: There will be a wedding. Her mother has earned this happiness, Jazmin thinks.

People often mistake the women for sisters. They go shopping at the Willow Grove Mall. Her mother's one weakness is shoes. Everyone kids her about her collection, but despite the indulgence, she's careful with money. She saved for 10 years to buy them this sweet place in a better neighborhood.

Isabel cooks in the tiled galley kitchen. They sit down to rice and beans and pollo guisado - a braised chicken stew - by the window.

Jazmin is not an athlete, but her mother loves softball. Sometimes they play catch after school.

Last summer, when Jazmin went away for a few weeks, Isabel surprised her.

"What's your favorite color?" she asked her daughter.

"Aqua."

When she came home, Jazmin found her bedroom painted the color of the early-morning sea in Puerto Rico. On the door, she had hung a wooden plaque. "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."

Lately, since so many police officers have been killed, her mother has been saying things like, "I want us to eat dinner together because my job is dangerous. It could be me next."

"Stop talking like that," Jazmin says.

Sometimes she's tempted to ask her mother to quit and find something safer. But she doesn't. Isabel wants Jazmin to go to college and get a good education. That's why she joined the police force. And why she stays.

"Being a cop," Jazmin says, "is a good, steady job."

When her mother puts on her uniform, she looks very professional. Her boots are shined, her uniform dry-cleaned and starched.

All her life, Isabel has played by the rules and believes those who do will be rewarded. Once, she had to control a crowd in the Badlands. Carlos was on the job that day and watched her in awe.

"How can you betray us by being a cop?" he heard someone shout in Spanish.

"I'm not betraying you," Isabel answered. "I'm setting an example for our race."

Little things get big

In the car on the way home from school, Pat talks about a friend who was just killed in an accident in Mayagüez.

"How did it happen?" Isabel asks.

"Her husband lost control of the car."

She takes her backpack and goes to her room to do homework while Pat starts dinner.

Isabel lies down to take a nap before her night shift. A few hours later, when she gets up, Jazmin has dozed off. Isabel doesn't wake her.

It will be the rare night when they don't kiss each other before she leaves for work.

Isabel gets into her uniform and puts on her police cap. Inside the crown, she has a photo of Jazmin from seventh grade, her dark bangs cut straight, a bright pink shirt, and a wide grin.

Jazmin hates the picture. She doesn't know her mother carries it around with her.

Not long after Isabel leaves for work, Jazmin gets up. She spends the evening in her room. About 9 p.m., while she is poking around on MySpace and listening to music, Andre Butler, a troubled 16-year-old from West Philadelphia, jumps into a stolen white 1999 Cadillac Escalade. Police chase him. He tears through the city, running red lights and stop signs, hitting 75 miles an hour. Isabel and her partner are called to assist in his pursuit.

They head south on 39th Street and enter the intersection at Wallace. Isabel, in the passenger seat, can see the white Cadillac charging toward her.

Into the maelstrom

Just before 10 p.m., Carlos calls Jazmin's cell.

"Your mom was in an accident."

"Is she OK?"

He doesn't say yes or no, but she can tell from his voice that he's hiding something. She wants to pack a bag to stay with her mother at the hospital, but there's no time: An officer will be there any minute to pick her up.

Jazmin quickly puts on jeans and a pink hooded sweatshirt. Then she hurries downstairs and tells Pat what Carlos has said.

From that moment everything happens so quickly her memory skids over patches, then snags on details.

In the car she thinks, "I hope to God she hasn't passed away." Then, "Don't think that way." They come to a hospital. She has no idea which one. Helicopters thump overhead. She sees masses of reporters and police, TV trucks and patrol cars, and among the strangers Carlos standing with her aunt, Mimi Mohamad.

"This isn't just an accident," Jazmin thinks.

She and her grandmother get out of the car. Carlos wraps his arms around her. "She didn't make it," he says.

"No puede ser!" This can't be happening, Jazmin screams. In the emergency room, people turn to watch her. She can't control her cries. Carlos holds her tightly, trying to calm her. She is led to her mother's bedside.

"Cover her face, please," she asks a nurse. She doesn't want to remember Isabel like this. The impact crushed the patrol car. The door was plowed in, pinning her mother to the console. It took more than 35 minutes to pull her from the wreckage. Her mother's partner was trapped, too, and left in critical condition.

Jazmin sits awhile, praying and holding her mother's hand. It is cold and heavy. A nurse comes to talk to her.

"Her heart stopped instantly," the nurse says.

"She felt no pain," Jazmin reasons. The thought is comforting. Although, honestly, "nothing is comforting."

She remembers asking to be taken to the hospital chapel, but little else of that night and the next few days.

She stays with her cousin Bryanna, Aunt Mimi, and Uncle Walid for awhile. The police bring the contents from her mother's locker. Inside the police hat, she finds the seventh-grade picture. She is so young there, only 12. She's growing up abruptly now.

Jazmin is asked where she wants to bury her mother.

"Puerto Rico," she says. She remembers her mother being happiest there.

Jazmin passed all her courses this year, but there weren't many A's. In April, the FOP threw her a blowout Sweet Sixteen. Her braces were to come off finally at the end of June.

"I try to be strong, not to show my family my pain" she says. She asks her grandmother to leave the room when she talks about the accident. "It upsets her to see me cry."

Dreams of a mother's duty

Whenever she dreams about her mother - four times so far since September - Jazmin writes down her dreams.

In one, her mother is giving her aunt instructions about how to raise her. "Don't give her so much food," Isabel tells Mimi.

In another, Jazmin says, "I am looking through the window of a mansion and I see this woman. She looks like my mother. I tell her, I know you're dead, just give me a hug for the last time. Then she tells me not to change who I am as a person, and the sofa she's sitting on turns to thorns."

The third starts out with the death of a Philadelphia police officer. "My mother is crying and I tell her I want her to stop being a police officer because I don't want that happening to her. But she says she has to, to pay for my college tuition."

That one, Jazmin says, "is the one that hurts the most."

Contact staff writer Melissa Dribben at 215-854-2590 or mdribben@phillynews.com.