Larry O’Reilly first saw Hennglise Dorival at a school in northern Haiti in 2011. He noticed the girl’s face was swollen on one side and asked why.

That question sparked a relationship that eventually led to the 16-year-old girl coming to the United States for surgery at a Norfolk, Va., hospital to have a 4-pound tumor removed from her face. O’Reilly said he paid more than $120,000 in medical, travel and other expenses for the girl, who came to the United States with her mother and interpreters.

“I couldn’t give up on her,” said O’Reilly, one of the scions of the O’Reilly family that founded a nationwide chain of auto parts stores. “I knew it would be fairly tragic for her if something didn’t happen.”

Hennglise had the surgery on April 28 at Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters. Surgeons removed the tumor, which was so large that it had pushed her left eye out of its socket and pushed her nose and mouth to one side of her face.

O’Reilly, who is retired but on the board of his family’s company, said a doctor told him that the tumor would have eventually cut off Hennglise’s airway.

“He said she had a very limited time, maybe a week, maybe a month before it would have suffocated her,” O’Reilly said. “She would have gone to sleep and not woken up.”

O’Reilly said the girl had never seen a doctor when he first asked about her. The town she lived in, Bahon, doesn’t have a medical clinic, O’Reilly said.

Hennglise eventually had an MRI which found the tumor. O’Reilly said a group of doctors went over to Haiti in 2011 and did a 14-hour surgery on Hennglise to remove the tumor. But it came back.

“I just couldn’t believe it didn’t work,” O’Reilly said. “For me this became a challenge. I was going to do anything to help Hennglise get a successful surgery and I knew we had to bring her to the U.S.”

O’Reilly said it was difficult to find a hospital that would take Hennglise because of the possibility that she could die during the surgery.

Project HOPE, a Christian service organization, and a nonprofit medical organization called Operation Smile helped bring Hennglise, her mother and two translators to the United States. O’Reilly went to Virginia to be with her.

Hennglise will probably need additional surgeries, but O’Reilly is hopeful.

“I’d love to see a way more kids like Hennglise can get help in the U.S..” O’Reilly said. “… Hennglise has grabbed my heart forever.”