Many Offer to Help Pay for Boy’s Burial Costs

Offers of cash donations have ensured that 8-year-old Omar Jimenez, killed when a window fell on him in his Santa Ana house, will have a funeral and burial close to home, his family said Friday.

By 4 p.m., more than 100 people had called either The Times Orange County Edition or Brown Colonial Mortuary in Santa Ana and offered to help pay for the boy’s funeral, estimated to cost $3,000.

“I do not have the words to express the gratitude I feel,” said Omar’s mother, Maria Elena Jimenez, who was at the funeral home where a Rosary was to be recited for her son Friday evening.

Omar died Wednesday after he returned home from school and, having forgotten his door key, tried to climb into the house through an open window. The window slid down onto him, apparently causing him to suffocate, authorities said.

The parents said the boy usually stayed by himself a few hours after school until they returned from work because they could not afford a baby-sitter.

Omar was born in the United States, but his parents said that without financial help they would have to take his body to Mexico for a less costly burial.

But on Friday afternoon, after the flood of offers of help, the family decided he could be buried here.

A Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Saturday in Our Lady del Pilar Catholic Church, 1622 W. 6th St., Santa Ana, with burial afterward in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange.

“I did not want to bury him in either place, but here (in Orange County) will be fine,” said a distraught Jimenez.

She said her mother and brothers and sisters all live in Mexico, in a town outside the city of Guadalajara. She has not notified them of Omar’s death, she said, because “they couldn’t come quickly anyway. They don’t have passports, and even if it is an emergency, they can’t come. It would just worry them. I will tell them soon.”

Her family in Mexico has no telephone, but Jimenez said she will call the public telephone in her town to notify them.

Jimenez said co-workers at TDK Magnetic Tape in Irvine, where she has worked for 10 years as an assembler, called to tell her they have collected $1,000. She said that because she has no other relatives here, her co-workers “are like my family.”

Grace Richer, the funeral director at Brown Colonial Mortuary, said at 4 p.m. that 25 or more people had telephoned the mortuary to offer money and that “a couple of people dropped by and left offerings in envelopes.”

One woman called and offered to donate a burial plot at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, but by then, Richer said, a grave had already been opened at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange. Given the promise of contributions and the distance to Whittier, the family declined the offer, Richer said.

Jimenez said she and Roberto Escalante, the father of her other two children, have no idea how much has been collected; they have been busy attending to her son. But she said the funeral directors have told them there is enough for a burial.

“It looks like, with God’s help, we will be able to pay for this after all,” Jimenez said. “I think we’ve gotten enough.”