Families of fallen troops honored

Reece Mastrapa sat at a table in the Anaheim Convention Center on Friday, watching a circus play out around him.

There were Santas and Snoopys, Snow White, snakes and soldiers, pirates and rock walls, cotton candy and popcorn -- even a soap-making station, a helicopter and an arcade.

The 6-year-old sat in the middle of it all, fiddling with a box of sunglasses, his baseball cap cocked to one side. As his mother talked excitedly about the event, the little boy with big brown eyes cut in to say, “I forgot my dad’s name.”

“Arthur Stacey,” said his 10-year-old sister, Marisa.

Reece was 4 months old when his father left for Iraq.

Army Reserve Sgt. Arthur Stacey Mastrapa, 35, was among three soldiers killed June 16, 2004, in a mortar attack on their camp in Balad, north of Baghdad, according to the Department of Defense.

On Friday, the Mastrapa family -- Reece, Marisa and their mother, Jennifer, of Longwood, Fla. -- were in Anaheim with the Snowball Express, a four-day, all-expenses-paid holiday celebration to honor the families of fallen U.S. troops.

In 2006, its first year, the charity faced a barrage of news reports about its founders’ checkered past. Michael Kerr of Laguna Niguel had an outstanding arrest warrant for failure to pay thousands of dollars in child support, a history of drug and alcohol addiction, faced a lawsuit filed by a former employer and accusations that he falsified his resume. There also were accusations that the charity’s accounting was less than accurate.

Last year, Kerr backed out of the Snowball Express Foundation after he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Now, organizers say, having survived the scandals, the Snowball Express is chugging along -- albeit without its founder. The nonprofit provides a winter holiday in Orange County for 1,400 children and their surviving parents. Next year, organizers said, the group will make a complete cut from its past when the event moves to Texas.

“We’ve tried to stay very transparent since we’ve taken over,” said Roy White, a Southwest Airlines pilot who has worked with the charity since its start.

The Snowball Express Foundation is a registered nonprofit whose accounting is available for inspection, he said. The charity raised about $5 million in cash and in-kind donations, including chartered flights for most of the families, hotel rooms, tickets to Disneyland and Universal Studios, and a host of other events.

On Friday, none of the details seemed to matter much to families who wore T-shirts with pictures of their lost loved ones and carried small American flags.

For the Mastrapa family, the trip is not just a mega-vacation, but a time to be “normal.” Back home, Jennifer Mastrapa said, they aren’t. When the widowed mother and her children go to restaurants, they are constantly asked, “Are you waiting for somebody?” When the children are at school, they have to explain why their father isn’t around.

When you’re around more than a thousand people just like you, no explanation is necessary, she said. “Here, they’re not immersed in grief counseling. It’s just other children going through the same thing.”

Once his mother stopped talking, Reece made his way to a bright-red ambulance set up in the middle of the convention floor for children to inspect.

With a grin on his face, he told the emergency medical technician that he had a broken heart and sat down while she used a stethoscope to check him out. She pronounced him in sound health, and he bounced out of the vehicle and moved on to a petting zoo.

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paloma.esquivel@latimes.com