Vegas’ forgotten children get headstones

On a tumbledown stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard, next to a dairy belching stench, the mourners made their way through yellowed grass, leafless trees and rows of modest headstones.

They huddled under two green canopies in a corner of Woodlawn Cemetery, clutching bright pink programs for the Children’s Memorial Service. The midmorning wind rustled a bouquet of balloons.

Mourners fished through their purses for tissues, though most had no tangible connection to the 63 children being lamented. The kids, for the most part, had been poor or abandoned and needed county burials.

Some died without officials knowing their full names (often because they died shortly after birth), leading to bureaucratic designations: Infant Trujillo Girls. Baby Boy Johns.

None of them, for years, had headstones.

Donna Coleman noticed this in November, when she attended a ceremony for a 7-month-old known as Baby Boy Charles, who had died of severe head trauma in 2006.

Last fall, his foster mother was found guilty of killing him, though she maintained that he had accidentally fallen off a washing machine. Donations funded a small headstone that read, “An Angel Sleeps Here . . . “

It was next to the grave of Adacelli Snyder, age 2. The girl, who had cerebral palsy, was found starved to death in 2005 in a squalid mobile home. Her mother and her boyfriend pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Adacelli’s brick-red marker -- also purchased with donations -- said she was “Always in Our Hearts.”

Coleman, 58, is a longtime children’s advocate, in a region better-known for attending to tourists than to abused and neglected kids. As Nevada’s population surge strained its child welfare agencies, Coleman helped found the Children’s Advocacy Alliance.

On the day Charles was buried, Coleman wondered: Why were few other graves marked?

Cost was probably a factor. The mortuary bill for an indigent child’s burial is $507, a cremation is $175, and neither includes a marker. In the last fiscal year, Clark County paid for the burials and cremations of 904 adults and children.

Over the years, at least one group had inquired about providing headstones. Things never quite worked out. Instead, the cemetery tracked the graves -- some with two children to a site -- with a grid that listed names and dates of burial.

Coleman found this intolerable. “A stone is a symbol of dignity,” she said.

So she drummed up publicity and raised more than $5,000. The county called the known contacts for a number of buried children; only one family that was reached declined a headstone. The cemetery donated a boulder that christens the Children’s Memorial Garden, where “You Are Not Forgotten.”

And so, on a sunny morning last month, dozens of advocates for children, foster parents and police officers gathered under the Woodlawn canopies.

The mood was as somber as any funeral, except for a few blissfully unaware children drawn to the pink and blue balloons.

On this morning, the headstone for Baby Boy Charles had a new neighbor: the marker for Roglio Bernal (date of burial: May 3, 2000).

Like the 42 others Coleman bought, it was a smooth granite rectangle etched with a teddy bear. On each new headstone, mourners had left a porcelain angel.

Coleman, a petite brunet in a burnt-orange suit, stepped up to a microphone and slowly, voice unwavering, announced some of their names: Andrew Singleton III, Infant Boy Dexter.

Others read more names: Juan J. Rivera, Maria Sibaja, Charles Smith. Pastor Gard Jameson, the president of Children’s Advocacy Alliance, offered a prayer, as did a rabbi and an imam.

The mourners were handed balloons -- Coleman’s was blue -- and then, much like the doves released for Baby Boy Charles, the balloons raced toward a blue sky and wispy clouds.

In the crowd, someone’s infant cried and cried.

ashley.powers@latimes.com