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For grieving community, there wasn't enough time

Hundreds of mourners gathered Saturday to say goodbye to two children and the lives they never lived.

BROOKSVILLE - At 11:30 a.m. Saturday, the clouds parted to form a soft, blue panorama across the sky.

Until then, there had been few rays of hope. Darkness had hovered over the black community in Brooksville for the past week. Two of their own had gone - hopefully to a better place, they said.

By noon, the sunlight took its rightful place over Wesleyan Church on Jasmine Drive, though grief held everyone in a stupor. Forlorn, they had come to remember Ja'Marion Badger and Richelle Hart, who a week earlier died after the pickup in which they were riding ran off Shoal Line Boulevard near Hernando Beach.

The howling cries of Jowatha Maner, Richelle's mother, punctuated the funeral service, echoed off the walls and rose dreadfully over the Rev. Irene Wells' rendition of the spiritual When the Gates Open.

Despite the grief, this was a celebration of life - all the more extraordinary because Ja'Marion, 61/2 months, and Richelle, 13, had just started living theirs. Wells, pastor at New Jerusalem Church of God, tried to reassure the mourners, who filled every pew of the church.

"This is eye-opening," Wells said, pounding the lectern. "It is a sad time. But joy is coming."

"I am sorry that it happened this way, but I don't question God," 27-year-old Somjai Maner said Thursday, the day before the wake for Ja'Marion and Richelle at Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church.

Maner was driving the Chevy pickup the morning of the tragedy.

Her love for her young daughter had brought four carloads of people - mostly children ages 7 to 14 - from Brooksville to the Hernando coast to celebrate the birthday of Maner's daughter, which had been the day before.

As the caravan headed west on County Road 550 toward Pine Island, Maner stopped to pick up an air pump. That is where she said everyone's seat belts came off. The other cars continued on.

Maner caught up with them in the parking area of the Bayport Inn. The others had driven out to Pine Island, but found it too crowded to park, much less swim. Someone suggested Hernando Beach Park, and she pulled her boyfriend's showcase Chevrolet truck behind the first car. They were off - Maner and four children in the cab and five other kids in the truck bed. It was about 11:30 a.m. on the Saturday that kicked off the Memorial Day weekend.

Heading south on Shoal Line Boulevard, the sporty pickup passed the entrance to Rogers Park on the Weeki Wachee River. A sign for Jenkins Creek Park was in the distance when Raven Pope, 8, bellowed from beside Maner: "Auntie, Auntie, there is a bee in here."

Maner told Raven to use the towel resting on Maner's lap and ease behind her to give the bee a swat. Raven grabbed the towel and placed her hand on the dashboard to brace herself. But she slipped, and her hand nudged the steering wheel, sending the truck into a lurch.

"It happened so fast," Maner said. "I never took my eyes off the road."

She saw the tree. Avoid it, she recalled thinking. But if she swerved toward the canal alongside the roadway, the pickup could flip, and everyone inside would drown. Her instincts told her to steer back onto the two-lane road.

The pickup struck the tree and wrapped itself around the trunk, pinning some children inside. The five children in the bed were thrown out: Richelle; Carina Hall, 11; Raquel Washington, 13; and 8-year-old twin brothers James Jr. and Jamerson Badger. Several of them were thrown into the canal.

Their relatives in the other vehicles saw it all unfold.

"It is just heartbreaking, and the family watching it all happen is just an awful tragedy on a holiday weekend," said Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Larry Coggins.

Fazed but not hurt, Maner began searching for children in the cab.

Raven was taken out first, then Takeria Black, 7, and Da'Meshia Sanders, 14. Baby Ja'Marion's car seat had been flung through the windshield, and Maner feared that he had gone with it. She found him on the floorboard.

"He was already gone," Maner said.

Her attention turned to the children in the canal, some in worse shape than others.

"What freaked me out is when I heard someone say, "Somjai, help me!' " Maner said.

A couple paddling on the canal came upon the wreckage of twisted metal - the truck's tires dangling ominously over the canal's edge. Towels, swim trunks and sandals were strewn along the shoulder of the road.

New Port Richey home builder Brett Patterson and his wife, Michele, a child care worker, began administering first aid to those worse off. Richelle was found floating facedown in the canal. No one knows how long she had been there. The Pattersons performed CPR on her for eight minutes before paramedics arrived.

For Maner, those moments remain frozen in time. It has not been an easy week for her.

When information about the crash began spreading through south Brooksville, people asked Maner a lot of questions.

She has struggled with her own trepidation and guilt.

Some people have been hostile - people she calls "haters." Others have offered support. Keep your head up, they have told her.

That is reassuring, Maner said, but the chides from cynics prevail. They call her "killer."

"The whole town is blaming me," she said.

While the initial FHP investigation determined the cause of the accident to be driver distraction. caused by the bee, spokesman Coggins said that Maner could face charges, including careless driving. While acknowledging that none of the nine children were properly restrained, Maner said her side of the story still must be told.

"We were not speeding," she said. "I was not drunk. I would not hurt these kids. Everyone around here knows that I love kids."

People forget, she said, that all of the children were relatives of hers. Both Richelle and Ja'Marion were her cousins.

Born Nov. 11, 2003, Ja'Marion was too young for people to extol his virtues. But he was alive long enough to earn the nickname "Doodie," and he liked trucks and bouncing balls.

Richelle, who had just finished seventh grade at West Hernando Middle School, had a youthful exuberance that drew people to her. She had the world before her, according to family and friends. No one doubted that.

She was a member of the school's volleyball and track teams. She was a member of the outreach ministry at Damascus Mission Church and was always among the first to volunteer with the Junior Elks Division of the Frederick Kelly Elks Lodge in Brooksville.

Shortly after 1 p.m. the day of the accident, the news reached JoAnn Munford at her home in Brooksville.

"They said, "Have you heard?' I said, "Heard about what?' " Munford recalled. "It was like a nightmare. I just shut down."

Word quickly spread down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to Howard's Barbecue, the Frederick Kelly Elks Lodge and Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, where Richelle had been a member since age 9.

By 2 p.m., waves of people, relatives and notable civic leaders, including NAACP president Frankie Burnett, rushed to Oak Hill and Spring Hill Regional hospitals, where some of the injured had been taken.

Between the gut-turning wails, some held cellular phones to their ears, telling the voices on the other end the little they knew. The emergency room telephone at Oak Hill rang at least five times during one hour. As they consoled grieving relatives, hospital personnel passed the chore of updating those who called to an older woman.

Everyone digested the calls, and began to decipher the fragmentary flow of information about what had happened, what had gone wrong, who had been injured, or killed.

Munford tried to find out what she could about the children. Richelle was a distant relative of hers, and many of the other children had visited the Jerome Brown Community Center, which Munford manages.

"That hit home," Munford said.

She raced to All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, where one child had been transferred, but she was turned away. Her daughter, Leiko, joined the crowd of people at Tampa General Hospital with a teddy bear in her arms that she gave to Richelle hours before she died.

"It touched the whole city," Munford said later, thumbing through a photo album bearing Richelle's picture. "It was too much for me this weekend. I really did not want to see the children in the conditions they were in. I am trying to get myself together. All of this affected all these people."

The two children became a powerful example of how a community unites - and how faith defines - in times of tragedy.

"It is a devastating blow to the community," said Brenda Mobley, a community organizer who works for Mid-Florida Community Services. "We are a close-knit community, and whenever one family mourns, we all mourn."

Their faith endured through Sunday, the day after the accident, as everyone hoped the seriously injured would pull through. Hope faded, however, when Richelle, who had earned the nickname "Smiley" from Elks members, died that night.

The news sent a second, more painful, shock through Brooksville and the rest of Hernando County.

Twelve-year-old Brittney Aybar, Richelle's friend since kindergarten and a classmate at West Hernando Middle School, received an instant message over her computer.

"Brittney just started crying," said her mother, Nicole McCormick, 32, of Spring Hill.

So did schoolmate Barbara Berrios, 13, who lives in Spring Hill. "It was kind of a shock because we've never been in a situation where we lose a friend," Barbara said.

Barbara described Richelle as outgoing, one of her good friends, not a gossip. "She had the biggest smile," she said. "It's awkward; it is sad what happened."

Coping with the death of a child is formidable, said West Hernando Middle School principal Joe Clifford. Clifford lost his daughter 17 years ago, and said the grief ebbs and flows, but never entirely fades. It will take time for the community to heal from the loss of Richelle and Ja'Marion, he said.

"You never forget," Clifford said. "It does not matter if Richelle was white or black. She was a child. It is difficult to understand what the reason may be when you lose a child. You have to just believe that is part of God's plan."

Sunlight poked through the trees at Brooksville Cemetery late Saturday afternoon, settling on the faces of the bereaved.

The wailing continued as Smiley and Doodie were laid to rest.

The children who watched the accident unfold and felt its impact firsthand continue to recover slowly.

There is no way to tell what the lasting impact on the community will be.

But their long caresses and attempts at smiles at the cemetery hinted that relief is coming.

Everyone will have memories of Ja'Marion, who leaves behind five brothers and three sisters, and Richelle, survived by one brother and two sisters.

Their parents wrote farewell messages in the funeral program.

Ja'Marion's parents, Angela Maner and James Badger Sr., wrote: "Mommy and Daddy will miss you very, very much. . . . When the sun shines we'll feel the warmth of your precious smile, and when the winds blows we'll receive a precious kiss from you."

Richelle's father, Richard Hart Sr., wrote: "You were my big girl, and the apple of daddy's eye. It's hard for me to accept. I could not say goodbye."

- Staff writer Jeffrey S. Solochek contributed to this report. Duane Bourne can be reached at 352 754-6114. Send e-mail to dbourne@sptimes.com