Headway on headstones for indigent children

Sam Morris

Donna Coleman uses a map to find the unmarked graves of unknown infants at Woodlawn Cemetery near downtown Las Vegas. The bench was donated in the name of Adacelli Snyder, who died of starvation in 2005.

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Whatever happened to the effort to get gravestones for the abandoned and impoverished children buried by Clark County at Woodlawn Cemetery?

After the Sun’s Dec. 5 story about children’s advocate Donna Coleman’s quest to mark the graves, donors called her and the cemetery to provide money for headstones. Manny Ceballos and his family, for example, donated enough for one gravestone. “We just wanted to get more involved because we didn’t think it was fair,” Ceballos, who owns four bail bonds offices, said. “It’s not right what happened to these children.” Thanks to donors like the Ceballos family, Coleman and the Children’s Advocacy Alliance now have enough money for 48 headstones that will have the names of two children on each. The gravestones will have each child’s name and date of burial.

Who are these children buried without gravestones?

At least 15 of the 96 children for whom Coleman was able to find records were wards of the state at the time of deaths. Others were the children of parents too poor to pay for a burial and headstone. Her list of deceased children goes back to 1998. Coleman said she also found that some of the buried remains around the children’s graves were those of adults. Along with the headstones, Woodlawn Cemetery has also donated a large stone that will be carved with “Children’s Memorial Garden” to designate the cemetery reserved for children.

When will the gravestones be put into place?

The hope is for Feb. 17. Coleman is awaiting final say-so from Clark County officials, who have told her they wanted to make calls to the parents of the children. Information on the ceremony, she added, will be posted at the Web site, childrensadvocacyalliance.com. Plans are for the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada to conduct the services.

Isn’t the county adding more unmarked graves all the time though?

The county now cremates the remains of those left in its custody, except for homicide victims.

What happens to the children’s ashes?

You’ve hit upon Coleman’s next venture. Coleman said the cremains are currently housed in a common mausoleum, one without visible markers.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do yet, but we’ll figure something out,” she said. “We can’t have this gigantic mausoleum with common cremains sitting there. That’s as bad as burying them without headstones.”

•••

The most recent meeting of the Committee on Community Priorities, a group established to give county officials an idea of what services are most important to county residents, naturally included quite a few pats on the back.

But it also included a dissenting opinion from the two government employee union representatives on the panel and a tongue-lashing from the committee’s chairman.

Who was the angry chairman of the committee?

Assemblyman Morse Arberry Jr., who took over the Las Vegas-Clark County Urban League in April.

What was his beef?

He took his committee colleagues to task for zeroing in on the need to reduce government employees’ compensation packages and for attacking the Legislature, where he has served since 1985.

“None of you have probably ever been a city or state employee. You don’t know what it’s like to sit in the fear. I was a city employee for 25 years,” Arberry said.

“Now city and state and county employees are making a decent wage. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to cut their wages, but I never saw any of you stand up when they weren’t making that money.”

Then he addressed how some of his colleagues probably don’t care enough about public schools or UNLV because they have children in private schools and out-of-state colleges such as Stanford.

“But as state legislators, we had to look at it as a whole. We had rural areas shutting down … As the state of Nevada, we had to take care of the people in the state of Nevada. We had to think how it was going to affect everybody, not just Clark County.”

The committee is expected to present its prioritized list of recommendations to the County Commission on Jan. 19.