350 Mourners Attend Funeral of Slain Girl, 7

In an emotional coming-together of an ethnically diverse community, 350 mourners attended the funeral Saturday of Phoebe Ho, a 7-year-old South Pasadena girl found strangled to death on Dec. 18.

“The incident of Phoebe’s death has brought a lot of sorrow to many, many people,” said the Rev. Felix Liu, a minister of the Evangelical Formosan Church of which the Ho family are members.

Several times during the service at Whittier’s Rose Hills Memorial Park, the girl’s mother collapsed into fits of uncontrollable sobs. She had to be physically restrained from flinging herself onto the coffin that held her daughter, an American flag and two teddy bears.

“The safety of our community is threatened,” Liu said. “We all have children.”

Added Warren Newman, superintendent of the South Pasadena Unified School District and one of several community leaders who delivered eulogies at the service: “It is our hope that this experience will reinforce in all of us what we need to do to make our country and our civilization better.”

Phoebe, a third-grader at Arroyo Vista Elementary School whose family emigrated from their native Taiwan three years ago, had disappeared while walking to school Dec. 11. For more than a week, scores of volunteers combed the area for clues and distributed thousands of posters bearing her likeness. Ten days ago, however, the little girl’s body was found in a Riverside County ditch, and a subsequent autopsy revealed that she had been sexually molested.

A spokesman for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department said Saturday that no new leads had been uncovered in the search for Phoebe’s killer.

Residents of her family’s South Pasadena neighborhood, meanwhile, say the series of events has left them deeply shaken.

“The working mothers in the neighborhood are devastated. They wonder when they go to work what is going to become of their children,” said Don Nelson, the Ho family’s next-door neighbor who said he put the American flag in the girl’s coffin because of her expressed love for her adopted country.

Seen as Unifying Force

In another way, he said, the incident has become a unifying force not only for South Pasadena but for all those in Los Angeles who had heard of it through the media. “It’s brought us together,” he said. “It’s not just one family grieving; we’re all one family.”

That theme was expressed again and again Saturday as mourners as diverse as a uniformed contingent of Guardian Angels, the South Pasadena chief of police and Phoebe’s classmates grieved side by side.

“It’s probably the most emotional service I’ve ever been to,” said George Brown, chairman of a group called the Phoebe Ho Center that had raised more than $5,000 to aid in the search for the missing girl. He said the money will be turned over to the girl’s parents, provided contributors agree. “What I really felt here,” he said of the funeral, “was a unification of the Asian and Caucasian communities.”

Because each of those groups was amply represented at the gathering, the service was conducted in both English and Mandarin. After joining with the church choir in renditions of such hymns as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the mourners followed a hearse to the grave site where each was given the opportunity to place a flower on the grave.

“We are really very grateful from the bottom of our hearts,” Sam Kau, one of Pheobe’s uncles, said in an interview afterwards. “This has cemented our community with love, and that’s a great comfort to us.”