NEIGHBORHOOD JEWEL SAYS GOODBYE.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

When the end came for Maya last week, the McNamara girls tearfully gave their dog one last kiss and pat on the head before saying goodbye.

She couldn't walk or stand anymore, and her raspy breathing and sad eyes told them all they needed to know. The pain was getting to be too much. It was ravaging her body. It was time to let her go.

They had a wonderful seven years together, the McNamara girls and their famous three-legged dog Maya.

You may remember them. I sure do. They gave me one of those columns you never forget.

It's like Amy - the oldest McNamara girl, now 19 - would tell her new friends when they came over to her house and saw Maya for the first time.

``Oh, you have a three-legged dog,'' they would say.

Amy would just smile and tell them, ``This isn't a three-legged dog, you guys. There's a story behind that dog.''

Yeah, there is. A heck of a story.

Deb McNamara's three girls weren't even teenagers yet when they were awakened late one Saturday night in August 1998 by the sound of a dog yelping in pain.

A few neighbors who were still awake saw a car speeding down Odessa Avenue at Hamlin Street in Van Nuys drag the puppy more than 50 feet before it fell away - writhing in pain.

It was the kind of scene that turns the stomach - makes some people shut their windows, draw the drapes and turn the TV set up loud so they don't have to deal with it.

Not the people living in this neighborhood. They came running out of their homes.

Deb, an operating-room nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, got to the puppy first. A few of the neighbors helped her put the bleeding pup on a board, and Deb drove it over to a local emergency-room veterinarian.

It was a stray, not her own dog, she told the vet. She couldn't stick around because her girls were being watched by one of the neighbors and she had to get home.

But she wrote down her telephone number and told the vet to give her a call the next day to let her know how the dog was doing. Then she went home to comfort her girls.

The call came the next morning. The dog was badly injured and would need a few operations costing approximately $3,000 to repair two broken femurs and a broken pelvis.

Since she was a stray, and no one would take responsibility for paying for those operations, the only alternative was to put her to sleep, the vet said.

Deb McNamara looked at her three girls and shook her head. How was she supposed to tell them that the puppy they were rooting so hard for was going to die because no one would accept financial responsibility?

``Give me 15 minutes,'' she told the vet. ``I'll call you back.''

Then Deb and her girls went knocking on neighbors' doors, asking if they could help out with a few dollars toward the operations because they couldn't afford to pay for it themselves.

Sure, said neighbors like Gina Yapelli. ``Everybody gave. That puppy made this whole neighborhood a lot closer,'' she said at the time.

Fifteen minutes later, Deb called the vet back. ``Keep her alive,'' she said.

Deb took the puppy to veterinarian Dr. Scott Anderson at California Animal Hospital. And he did just that. Kept her alive. But he couldn't save the puppy's right hind leg.

A week later, the McNamara girls brought the puppy home and named her Maya, after a popular singer they liked. I called to see how the puppy was doing, but Deb was already at work.

Amy answered the phone. She was baby-sitting Maya with her sisters, Kelly, now 17, and Haley, now 15.

``She's doing great,'' Amy told me. ``She just peed on the carpet.''

Over the years, the McNamara girls would take out the half-dozen boxes filled with hundreds of letters from people who wrote them after they read the story of Maya.

They'd take turns reading the letters aloud to Maya, and then cry a little. With everything bad going on in society, it was so refreshing to see that people still had a lot of heart, Amy said Friday.

Maya's story touched so many people that veterinarian Anderson received donations far exceeding the cost of the operation. He passed them on to animal-rescue organizations.

``Maya never let that missing leg stop her from doing anything the other dogs were doing,'' Amy said Friday.

``We'd take her to the dog park and she'd run around with them all day. For a long time, people would stop us and say, `Isn't that the dog that was in the newspaper?'

``She was so spoiled. There were times I'd say, `Mom, c'mon, she's a dog.' She was the princess of our home.''

The girls didn't go along last week when mom took Maya back to the vet. They said their goodbyes to her at home. It was just too emotional for them. For Deb, too. She still can't talk about it without crying.

But Deb wanted everyone who had written or called her family with kind words - and those who helped her pay for those three operations that kept Maya alive seven years ago - to know that she had a great life right up until the end.

Spoiled rotten. The princess of the family.

Dennis McCarthy, [phone]

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

In 1998, Deb McNamara posed with daughters Amy, left, Haley and Kelly, and Maya, a pup the whole neighborhood pitched in to save.

Daily News