Gardens provide solace for grieving parents

SHADED BY the towering trees, Marilyn Dougherty tends the green hosta plants and places a blue wind chime in her son's memorial garden. His high-school graduation photo is on display. There are two benches on which to sit and contemplate.

In this oasis of serenity, away from the violence, away from the roar of Interstate 95, away from the tombstones, she feels peace.

"It's better than a cemetery," Dougherty said last week as she stood in the garden, one of about 50 in the 3.5 acres of the Living Memorial Gardens, in Upper Chichester, a valley of solace created by the Delaware County chapter of Parents of Murdered Children.

The chapter, part of the Ohio-based national POMC organization, serves as a support group for parents whose children have died by violence. Members meet monthly at a church in Parkside.

The chapter is hosting the organization's national conference this year at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott from Aug. 12-15.

Montgomery County also has a POMC chapter, one of about 65 in the nation. It also has monthly meetings and a memorial garden. And it is helping out with the national conference.

Delaware County's garden, on Furey Road across from the Upper Chichester Police Department, is a place where family members can cultivate the memories of their loved ones.

The land was donated by the Upper Chichester commissioners in 2000. The garden was created and dedicated the next year.

"It was the dirtiest wetlands," said Barbara DiMario, chapter leader of the Delaware County group. Chapter members, their families and friends, community members, Eagle Scouts and township commissioners all chipped in, cutting down some trees, clearing the land, making bridges and paths.

Low-level offenders in the court system who are ordered to do community service also maintain the garden paths.

Each garden is cared for by the victim's family. The gardens give peace. But each carries a haunting story.

As Dougherty and her daughter Diane Dougherty O'Hara walked on the wood chips of a well-kept path, they pointed out the other souls whose memories live on in the garden.

There's 1-year-old Madison Bierling, beaten to death in 1998 by her baby sitter. There's Katelyn Rivera-Helton, who was kidnapped and killed by her father in 1999. There's Sean Patrick Conroy, 36, the Starbucks manager who suffered a fatal asthma attack after being beaten by a group of teens in a Center City subway concourse in 2008.

As for Dougherty, she will always remember her son Bobby Suny as being 19 years old, when he was killed.

Suny was walking home one night from a carnival in Southwest Philadelphia, where the family lived before they moved to Darby Borough. He was walking alongside train tracks when he crossed into the Darby side, where a group of youths were drinking, doing drugs, partying.

"One of them had a gun," O'Hara said.

That youth wanted to hit something moving.

O'Hara, who learned these details from authorities, said that her brother then walked by and was shot in the chest.

A couple of the youths then moved Suny's body onto the tracks, hoping a train would hit it. Suny, perhaps trying to get off the tracks or just in shock, crawled partway off. It was believed he was already dead when a train came by, clipping the heel of his foot, before the conductor stopped. The conductor called police.

It was July 12, 1979.

For Marilyn Dougherty, sometimes it seems like yesterday.

What angers the family is that although police have a suspect in the murder, there's not enough evidence to bring charges.

"Believing he's the man, knowing he's the man, my gut instinct, I would have to be able to prove it," Darby Borough Police Chief Robert Smythe said when asked last week about the case. What's missing, he said, is "the one smoking gun," the one, critical piece of evidence.

After the murder, the case was taken before a grand jury. Witnesses admitted being at the party, but some said they left before the shooting or came later, Smythe said.

"Nobody came right out and said" who did it, said Smythe, who was not part of the grand-jury investigation.

By the time the case was re-opened several years ago, some of the witnesses had died. The Doughertys heard that some died of drug overdoses and that one witness may have killed himself.

Smythe said that police tried talking with the person they that think killed Suny but that man got a lawyer and wouldn't talk.

Then, in 2004, that man ended up killing someone else. He pleaded guilty in 2005 to involuntary manslaughter and possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to four to 10 years in prison, served a little more than four years and is now out.

Knowing that he's free is like "mental torture," Dougherty said.

O'Hara said that after her brother was killed, her mother lost weight, "never left her bedroom, didn't want to talk to the parish priest. I'm talking 10 years."

O'Hara, 44, said that her mother's joining the Parents of Murdered Children group was "the best thing she did."

Dougherty, of Norwood, now serves on the Delaware County chapter board, sending out cards to people on the anniversaries of their loved one's deaths. She has a card to be mailed every day, she said.

She said that she used to dwell and obsess about her son's murder. She's still angry that his killer is out free while her son has "missed out on everything" in the past 31 years.

With the help of POMC and the garden, Dougherty has progressed through her grief.

"It's not a sad place for me," Dougherty said of the peaceful garden, as birds chirped and a creek burbled nearby. "It's like his home."

"She can take care of him here," her daughter said of the little patch of land, plants and garden ornaments. "Like she can clean my house, it's her way of doing something for him."

Jane McPhee, secretary and treasurer of the Delaware County chapter and coordinator of the upcoming national conference, expects about 400 attendees. She said that the conference is open to all survivors, criminal-advocate professionals, educators and anyone else interested in victim justice. There will be ceremonies, workshops, speakers. And there will be visits to the garden.

McPhee's stepdaughter, Steph-anie McPhee-Moser, was 26 when she was murdered Sept. 10, 2001, by her husband in the couple's home just outside New Orleans.

McPhee-Moser's father, Tom McPhee, 60, said from his Norwood home that the POMC group "was a big help" to him "because I didn't know who to turn to; neither did Jane. People didn't know how to act around us."

With chapter members, they "know how you feel because they're going through the same thing," he said.

When he returned to work after his daughter's death, "people would turn around in the hallway, like I had the plague."

With POMC, "you have a great support group," he said. "The park is great. It's a nice place to go out there and sit and meditate. You can take your anger out in the ground out there."

Jane said that she echoes her husband's thoughts about POMC.

"It probably saved our marriage," she said. "The anger and frustration that you go through, the not knowing, the what ifs, the kicking yourself."

McPhee-Moser lived with her husband, James "Jimmy" Moser, in Metairie, La., with their two young kids.

A few days before McPhee-Moser was slain, her husband was arrested on child-porn charges in connection with a neighbor's young daughter.

On Sept. 10, 2001, the couple was said to have been arguing over Moser's arrest and on allegations that he had sexually molested their two children, Tom McPhee said. Moser then severed his wife's spinal cord with an awl.

While awaiting a jury's verdict in his trial for his wife's murder in April 2006, Moser, 34, hanged himself in his holding cell at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center.

The jury found him guilty. Moser had already been convicted of possessing and attempting to possess child pornography in a previous trial, and had been awaiting trial on two counts of aggravated incest.

The children are with their maternal grandmother.

DiMario, 69, of Media, said that she formed the POMC chapter in 1995 to help people through the court system, to offer support, to help people live again. The chapter also has Philadelphia members, she said.

Members are "there to reach out to the next person that comes in," she said. Membership is fluid, as people move in and out, depending on their needs.

DiMario's daughter, Hope Ann DiMario-Popoleo, was 26 when she was shot to death April 21, 1993, by Teryl Wyrick, a man who had been stalking her.

That night, at the then-Pennant bar, on MacDade Boulevard in Ridley Township, Wyrick had been harassing her daughter and was asked to leave the bar, DiMario said she learned. He returned shortly afterward with a gun.

Wyrick shot her daughter three times in the back, the mother said. Each time she tried getting up, "he kept shooting her," she said.

Another man in the bar, Rick Pepe, 36, tried to keep Wyrick away from her daughter with a cue stick, but Wyrick shot him in the neck. Pepe died the next day, DiMario said.

Wyrick was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 10 to 20 years in prison.

With the POMC chapter, DiMario wants other parents to "know they're not alone," whether it's dealing with the court system or with their pain and sorrow.

The chapter is there to "get them to move to a different level," she said. "It's just a part of grief in different respects.

"You can't stay in grief."