EVERETT — Sharon Jones knows her grandson isn’t there.
Still, the tidy memorial alongside old Broadway gave her some peace.
She reflexively looked for the white cross as she drove by on her way to the mall or back to her Everett apartment. Over the last two years she, her kids and g
randkids have gathered at the site to remember Derrick Everson, his sweet smile and silly pranks.
The ground there has soaked up their tears and held firm when their world was crumbling.
Everson was stabbed to death on Aug. 20, 2009 on a wooded trail near the memorial. He was 21.
As Jones and her family are learning to live without him, vandals have come along and caused more pain.
Someone destroyed the slain man’s memorial late last week. The cross was ripped out of the ground and thrown into some bushes. A glass angel was shattered. A second wooden cross and Everson’s picture are missing.
“What else can be taken from him? What else?” Sharon Jones asked as she sat at her small kitchen table earlier this week.
Jones raised Everson and his brother. He made her laugh and sometimes wring her hands with worry. She misses hearing his voice and his bear hugs. She talks to him before she falls asleep at night.
Some days she goes into his room. She squeezes the quilted pillow her daughter made for her after Everson’s death. The center block is a picture of grandma and grandson.
“I feel like I’m losing him all over again,” Jones said, her eyes welling up with tears.
Everson doesn’t have a cemetery plot to visit. His family erected the roadside tribute the day after he was killed. They wrote goodbye messages on the white cross. They gathered there again the day the man who killed Everson was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
For nearly two years, no one has disturbed the memorial. That made the family feel good. The community respected their grieving.
Overnight that changed.
“The whole thing was destroyed. I’m heartbroken,” Tonja Jones said.
She helped her mom raise the boys. She’s always looked out for her nephew. She hasn’t stopped even now that he’s gone.
She faithfully decorated the memorial — bright-colored flowers in the spring, red velvet bows and smiling snowmen in the winter and carved jack-o’-lanterns in the fall. She kept the site tidy.
Her mom called on Saturday. Sharon Jones was driving some friends to pick up a car. She drove by the trail, looked for the white cross. Then she panicked. The tears came and her breath left.
Her grandson’s murder has taught her to be suspicious. She sees anger in the vandalism, maybe someone doesn’t wanted to be reminded of what happened there under the canopy of trees.
“How dare someone do that. Derrick was a person,” Tonja Jones said. “That was the only place we had.”
She went down to the trail and picked up the broken pieces — something she and her family have been doing since violence ripped through their lives.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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