Weaving Memories : Parents Fashion Quilt to Remember Young Victims

They come Saturdays with bulging scrapbooks and framed family photographs cradled carefully in their arms.

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The parents of children killed in drive-by shootings and stabbings gather at a storefront in South-Central Los Angeles in hopes of putting a personal face on an all-too-often anonymous crime statistic in the Southland.

They are sewing together a quilt that uses pictures and words to depict the lives of 18 young murder victims.

“He was 14. He was at a Valentine’s Day party,” says Hattie Ellis, leafing through the bound family album crammed with memories of son Renard Ellis.

“Here, this is his birth certificate,” says Ellis, pulling it from beneath a plastic page covering. There’s a resolution from the City Council, which adjourned in her son’s memory after his 1987 murder. There’s the pathology report that shows there were no drugs or alcohol in her son’s body when he died. There are happy school pictures and sports photos.

The photographs and mementos Ellis and the others brought with them are being reproduced on fabric at a copy shop and then sewn to 30-inch patches of cloth that make up the quilt.

Its 18 squares depict the young victims as their parents remember them--bright-eyed and innocent, not coroner’s case listings or homicide file numbers.

Thomas Smith attached a brilliant gold border around the photo of his son, Hushun Smith, shot in the back last year at age 21.

“I’ll put some words on it next. I have to go down in my soul and get the thoughts back up--I’ve kept them down,” the salesman said as he worked on his swatch. “I’m doing this for my benefit. I want to keep my son’s memory alive.”

But the parents admit their stitch work is for others, as well. Maybe the faces on the quilt will motivate government leaders to spend more on crime prevention. Maybe they will shame a few gang-bangers into putting away their weapons.

“All these good-looking faces staring out at you has to have an effect,” said Myrtle Faye Rumph, who has sewn the Statue of Liberty medallion and the watch her son was wearing when he was killed in a 1989 drive-by shooting next to his high school graduation picture.

Rumph helped organize the quilt makers and invites them each Saturday morning to the Western Avenue storefront, headquarters for the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center. That is the nonprofit youth center Rumph started four years ago and named after her slain son.

The quilt will be taken to City Hall and shown to politicians when it’s finished, she said.

“It will tell people what’s going on,” Rumph said. “It will tell people there’s a crisis going on.”

Victims’ parents were recruited for the quilt project through churches and family counseling centers. Several experienced quilt makers are helping teach sewing and photo-transfer techniques.

“Some of the things they are putting on the quilts make me cry,” said quilter Ann Anderson, a Manhattan Beach computer saleswoman.

Linda Clark’s son was shot to death in late 1991. She pulls a newspaper clipping from her scrapbook: “Drive-by Shooting Kills College-Bound Athlete,” reads the headline.

“James was 19. This is him when he was born. This is a picture of him when he was 14 wearing a football jersey. That’s the picture I’m going to use on the quilt,” Clark said.

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Across the room, Maglean May is starting to sew the words “Joseph Rueben May, July 1961-March 1993” next to a smiling portrait of her son.

“He loved cars. I think I’m going to put a car up here,” she said, pointing to the upper-right corner. “This is very difficult--I had to lie down after sewing his picture on. But it’s something I have to do.”

Over by the door, Cathy Bower has sewn a fabric-transferred photograph of her brunet daughter, Bethany, onto a heart. There are souvenir patches from rock ‘n’ roll groups Kiss, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin positioned around the heart.

“She loved music,” said Bower, an office administrator from El Segundo. Her daughter was working in an anti-narcotics program when a drug user stabbed her to death in 1988, she said.

“Every push of the needle through this cloth was like a knife in my heart,” Bower said. “But maybe this will give meaning to our children’s lives. Maybe it will have the impact of stopping other people before they’re dead in their tracks.”

Television actor Ron Glass, who starred in “Barney Miller” and “The New Odd Couple,” agrees. Glass is a Wooten Center volunteer who introduced retired businessman Costantin Patarias to the center after Patarias proposed the drive-by victims’ blanket idea after seeing a similar quilt made for AIDS victims.

“I hope this is a powerful wake-up call in terms of people recognizing these are real people’s lives,” Glass said. “The ones who have passed on. And the ones left behind.”