Mystery Surrounds Girl’s Death -- and Life

The priest sat near a small white casket, looking at the empty funeral home chapel. A 5-year-old girl’s body lay in repose, her head resting on white linen.

It was Thursday, April 7, the morning of the little girl’s wake, and no one had come. Father Matt Foley stared at the chapel doors. About half an hour had passed. Where was the family?

Eventually six people showed up, one claiming to be the child’s aunt. It wasn’t clear who the others were or how they might have known Jessica Chavez.

Foley didn’t see Jessica’s mother, the desperate woman who had come to him four days earlier saying that her daughter had died at a Kansas City, Mo., hospital and that she couldn’t afford to bring the body home to Chicago.

Foley made arrangements to transport the body, covered the costs, set up this wake, a Mass and a proper burial. He asked the aunt and the others of the mother’s whereabouts. They said they didn’t know, lowered their heads and said no more. He recalls their faces revealing no emotion.

The priest felt it wasn’t his place to judge how others chose to grieve. But he couldn’t stop wondering how a beautiful 5-year-old child could die and have only six mourners. How could a mother miss her little girl’s funeral?

He sat in silence, praying. Who was this little girl? Who was Jessica Chavez?

Police in Kansas City know this much: A woman who identified herself as Mariam Chavez arrived at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City in the early morning of Saturday, April 2, with a 5-year-old girl she said was her daughter, Jessica Chavez. In a police report, an emergency room nurse said it appeared Jessica had been dead for several hours.

Police arrived at the hospital at 3:35 a.m.

A medical examiner would later determine that Jessica had died of natural causes: sepsis, a blood infection, brought on by a severe case of bronchopneumonia. She had marks all over her body that looked like bruises but were a side effect of her illness, not the result of trauma.

“This was a very, very ill child,” said Thomas Young, chief investigator at the Jackson County medical examiner’s office.

Her death certificate gave few details. She was born Aug. 7, 1999, in Mexico. No city was listed; neither was her father’s name.

The woman, speaking broken English, told police she had been living in Chicago while Jessica stayed with relatives in Mexico, but Jessica had fallen ill so Chavez had come to get her, hoping to bring her to a U.S. hospital.

She said they boarded a bus in Dallas the previous morning en route to Chicago.

But Jorge Mares, office manager for El Conejo Bus Lines in Chicago, said he remembered the woman and little girl boarding a southbound bus toward Kansas City, which left Chicago on the afternoon of Friday, April 1. He said the bus was bound for Dallas, but the woman and girl were going only as far as Kansas City.

The woman told police that Jessica started throwing up on the bus near Kansas City. When the bus stopped, El Conejo officials called an ambulance, Mares said.

At the hospital, the mother gave authorities a Chicago address and a telephone number with a 312 area code. Sgt. James McAdams, who was at the hospital, said the little girl’s body was emaciated, her hair unkempt and dirty.

He said the mother’s behavior was erratic.

“Part of the time she’d be just normal, then the next moment she’d be despondent,” he said. “She didn’t seem to understand what was going on.”

Fearing the mother might be suicidal, police took her to a nearby mental health center for observation. Police left the hospital about 6 a.m.

McAdams said that despite the circumstances of the girl’s death, there was no cause to keep Chavez in custody. Once she was cleared to leave the Western Missouri Mental Health Center, he said, she was free to go. The health center, citing privacy laws, would not confirm that she was ever there.

That was the last time any officials in Kansas City saw Mariam Chavez.

At 10 the next morning, 28 hours later, a woman claiming to be Mariam Chavez sat in the parish office of St. Agnes of Bohemia Catholic Church in the Little Village area of Chicago, about 530 miles from Kansas City. It was a Sunday, and Foley had just finished the second of the day’s nine Masses. He walked into the parish rectory to check messages and was approached by a weary-looking woman.

She pulled a wrinkled Polaroid picture from her pocket and showed the priest an image of a small girl, with shoulder-length black hair, dark skin and a sweet smile.

The woman explained to Foley that the girl, her daughter, had died in Kansas City the previous day, that she had been up all night and was searching for someone to help her bring the child’s body back to Chicago.

She spoke perfect English, unlike the woman in Kansas City who claimed to be Jessica’s mother. “She never cried,” Foley recalled. “But I could tell the woman was desperate.”

They spoke for about half an hour. Foley told Chavez the church would cover the costs of transporting the body and giving the girl a proper funeral and burial.

He took her name, phone number and address, all of which matched the information given to Kansas City police the previous day.

On Monday, April 4, the same woman went to Frank Marik & Sons Funeral Home in Little Village. She sat down with funeral director Robert Marik, signed the release forms, gave him a white dress for Jessica to wear and picked out a simple, $225 white wooden casket. She wanted the Mass said in English.

Marik didn’t ask Chavez for any identification. He said he never did unless something seemed suspicious. “At that point, there was nothing that would raise the hair on my back,” he said. “I thought they were very quiet. But that’s not unusual.”

The release forms went to a funeral home in Kansas City, Kan., where the body -- about 3 1/2 feet tall and only 35 pounds -- was cleaned and embalmed. Thad Rogers, who runs the funeral home, still remembers Jessica and the ragged state of the body he received.

“She had lice in her hair,” Rogers recalled. “Bless her heart. She was such a beautiful little girl.”

Jessica’s body was picked up at O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday, April 6, in a simple wooden crate. Marik dressed her, placed her body in the casket, adjusted her hair so it nicely framed her tiny face.

He couldn’t help but think how peaceful she looked. Almost as though she were asleep.

The morning of Thursday, April 7, the day of Jessica’s funeral, was damp and cloudy, a still-wintry 48 degrees.

Jessica’s body lay in the casket, flanked by two burgundy lamps that cast a pink glow on her white dress. Foley said a couple of prayers, then sat down.

He has been a priest in the heavily Latino Little Village more than five years and previously served the church in Mexico for six years. The small turnout at Jessica’s wake troubled him.

“Culturally speaking, this was a big contradiction of the customs I’ve seen,” he said. “We’ve buried children who’ve lived a day or two and there’ve been 100, 150 people. I’d never seen anything like this. Not for a child.”

The casket was carried to a hearse and taken to St. Agnes. There were no flowers, no stuffed animals or special toys near the casket. Just the six mourners, the priest, a guitar player and the funeral director.

Foley’s voice echoed through the ornate church as he said a 50-minute Mass. He found himself growing angry that he had so little to say.

“I didn’t know what made her happy or sad, what made her laugh, who hugged her, what her favorite toy was,” Foley said. “It’s hard not to be generic. I had nothing.”

He was struck afterward that no one had shed a tear.

The body was taken to the far southeast corner of Mount Olivet Cemetery on the South Side, to a pauper’s grave donated by Catholic Charities. Foley said a prayer over the grave, then left the family alone.

“At that point I’d about had it,” he said. “I was disillusioned by this gathering. Something wasn’t right.”

On Foley’s drive home, Jessica’s face stuck in his mind. “I just buried a 5-year-old girl whose mother nor father nor any relatives or friends to speak of showed up to say goodbye,” he said. “That was a lonely drive.”

The following Sunday, Foley stood before his congregation and told Jessica’s story.

“What does it say about our world when this can happen?” he asked. “This most privileged nation that we live in, with so many blessings, how is it that a 5-year-old girl dies in a hospital and is buried without a mother or father present? What are we doing wrong and what could we be doing better?”

Within the next week, Foley learned that the address Mariam Chavez had given him -- 6801 S. Cicero Ave. -- didn’t exist. It’s an overpass over a dozen or more train tracks. The phone number she had given was a disconnected Verizon cellphone.

Neither he nor Marik got the names of any of the people who attended the funeral. They never heard from anyone regarding the little girl, nothing about plans for a headstone.

It was as though anyone who might have known Jessica had vanished.

Jessica died on a Saturday morning. By Monday, the Kansas City police had contacted Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services, and that agency launched an investigation into possible abuse and neglect. It proceeded with the information police provided, including the mother’s name and her Chicago address.

A homicide detective in Kansas City, Richard Marquez, was assigned the case, but his investigation didn’t last long.

“She arrived in Kansas City dead,” Marquez said. “We really don’t have a whole lot as far as the investigation, other than that she was found to be dead by natural causes.”

The Missouri Child Fatality Review Board has the case on hold until it receives more information.

In Chicago, a DCFS investigator found that the address the mother gave was fake. Agency spokeswoman Diane Jackson said the investigator then began an all-out search for the mother.

The search led to an apartment building in suburban Stickney. Jackson said the investigator spoke with tenants from all six of the building’s apartments. None had ever heard of Mariam Chavez.

“All trails led to a dead end,” Jackson said. “We don’t know what happened to this child.”

And perhaps no one ever will.

A search of public records found no one named Mariam Chavez had ever lived in Chicago.

It’s likely the woman Foley thought was Jessica’s mother was not the same woman with the girl in Kansas City. Aside from differences in how the women spoke, police described Chavez as short and heavyset. The woman Foley knew as Mariam Chavez was tall and not particularly heavy.

Many parishioners at St. Agnes have prayed for the little girl they never met. Rosario Probo, who was touched by Jessica’s story when she heard Foley preach, raised more than $200 to buy a headstone, which she says will be rose colored and engraved with the words, “Our Little Angel.”

She has held off getting the headstone, hoping at least to find proof that Jessica Chavez is the child’s real name. Until then, she visits the gravesite occasionally, recently leaving some evergreens wrapped in a pink bow.

Foley returned to Mount Olivet for the first time the day before Thanksgiving. He had thought about going before, but said it was too hard.

“Something about this just haunts me,” he said. “I was in our church preschool the other day and the kids were singing a new song. It’s a magical age, a magical time. And you think, ‘This is Jessica’s age, this is her time. This should be her.’ ”

Foley struggles to accept that he may never know who Jessica was, why she was on that bus when she was so ill, whether the woman he spoke with that Sunday morning was the girl’s mother.

He figures it’s possible Jessica was the daughter of undocumented immigrants who fled when she died for fear they’d be caught. He wonders if someone might have been smuggling the girl into the country for someone else, and whether there’s a mother somewhere with no idea what has become of her daughter.

At the unmarked grave, in a bitter wind that pushed waves of fallen leaves across the cemetery grass, Foley knelt, took a simple cross made of walnut wood and pressed it into the moist ground, twisting it left and right until it stayed in place.

He bowed his head, said a silent prayer, then looked up with tears in his eyes.

“If you could’ve seen her,” he said. “She was pretty special.”

Foley walked away, across the cemetery, knowing in his heart that God would want him to quell his frustration, move on and let Jessica rest in peace.

But he can’t do it. He just can’t let her go.