Marking where life was lost

It breaks Tracey Schwartz-Corsey's heart.

Without interference, she and her family for two years maintained a memorial for her niece Nicole Lee Schwartz around a tree at the State Road site in the Far Northeast where a drunken driver struck and killed the woman in 2004, just shy of her 22d birthday.

When it snowed, they shoveled. When people littered, they cleaned. At the holidays, they strung tree lights. They nailed pictures and sports jerseys to the tree and placed flowers and teddy bears around it.

"I feel like I can talk to her when I'm there. I feel like a part of her is there," said Schwartz-Corsey, 40, of the Parkwood section of the Northeast.

Then, a year ago, neighbors complained, and the Fairmount Park Commission, which owned the tree, got involved. Everything on the tree had to be removed. And now, the flowers and candles placed nearby often are stolen - even a five-foot cross.

"That's all we had, and they took it from us," a tearful Schwartz-Corsey said.

The number of makeshift memorials around the city has grown in recent years, fueled by the increase in the homicide rate. The one for slain Police Officer Chuck Cassidy grew so big in front of a West Oak Lane Dunkin' Donuts, where he was shot, that a canopy was erected over it.

Though that fresh memorial has brought positive sentiments, others - such as the one for Schwartz - have stirred controversy.

In the summer, District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham publicly expressed frustration over the memorials, saying that the energy would be better spent giving tips to police to help catch the killers. She clarified her position last week through spokeswoman Cathie Abookire: "It's all well and good when people erect a memorial in somebody's memory. However, solid information about the perpetrators of a crime is better."

That fortunately happened in the Cassidy case, Abraham said.

One grieving mother, Kisha Bivines, 34, hates how teddy bear memorials have become a routine, accepted response to an abnormal demise - the killing of a child.

She became so angry about the memorial that sprang up for her 17-year-old son, Ivan Simmons, shot to death last year in Nicetown, that she dismantled it the very next day and spray-painted "peace" on the wall that bore his name.

"To have to drive by the spot in which my son was murdered and to be reminded constantly what happened, it's like reliving the nightmare over and over again," she said. "So many memorial sites go up, it makes the city look like a graveyard."

A local cemetery is developing a new way to channel the grief. With $100,000 in seed money from the Pew Charitable Trusts, Laurel Hill Cemetery plans to launch "The Urban Mourning Project" next fall. By engaging children in art and studies on mourning across cultures, the project aims to help them cope with losing a loved one to homicide.

"Seeing the memorials in our neighborhood, they struck me as creative expressions of grief, modern urban mourning rituals," said Ross Mitchell, executive director of Laurel Hill Cemetery, a national historic landmark in East Falls.

"Let's take these naturally occurring urges and channel them in a creative and constructive way to help [children] work through their grief and break the cycle of violence in some small way."

Street-side memorials first emerged in other countries and have become more popular in the United States over the last few decades - first surfacing for car-accident victims and then for other types of deaths, local academics said.

And the 19th century had its own "teddy-bear memorial of the day," Mitchell said.

Then, he said, a broken urn on a gravesite meant a violent death. A broken column signified an untimely death.

Academics have noticed the local proliferation of public memorials, which are designed to honor people at the spot where they met their demise.

"There is something afoot in America . . . what I believe to be an increased willingness to carry our heart on our sleeve or to reveal our inner feelings publicly," said Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor at Temple.

He likes the memorials, but understands there may be a need to regulate the length of time they remain, their content, or their location.

"Maybe municipalities should write rules so it doesn't get horribly messy," he said.

Some have made attempts. Delaware's department of transportation created a park at the Smyrna rest stop of the Dupont Highway to memorialize accident victims statewide in place of roadside shrines.

In Philadelphia, some memorials remain for years.

Affixed to a pole at Queen Lane and Greene Street in Germantown are statues, stuffed animals and a flag, in memory of Adam Hammer, who was shot to death on Sept. 28, 2004.

Others naturally disintegrate.

Victoria Yancey, a Philadelphia School District employee who helps families of children who die, sees memorials where "the teddy bear is just fading away, like a person's spirit might be fading away."

From family to strangers, some find comfort in them.

On Tuesday, the day before Officer Cassidy was buried, Maria Breyman stopped at the corral of stuffed animals, balloons, flowers in cellophane, and handwritten cards.

The 20-year-old La Salle University student set down a teddy bear and a card.

"It made me feel like I can say I added something to show my appreciation for what he did," Breyman said.

Jessica Checchia, finance manager for Tri-State Auto Inc., which is next to the Dunkin' Donuts, said placing balloons at the memorial gave her "closure."

"It is some kind of peace for people to have somewhere to go and say goodbye," said Checchia, who added that she knew Cassidy.

Melvin Figueroa, 40, whose pregnant daughter La'Toyia was killed by her boyfriend in 2005, keeps an entire wall in his living room as a memorial, with a poster-size picture of La'Toyia, her obituary, and mementos.

"It helps me to know she's there by my side," he said.

City Councilwoman Joan Krajewski is trying to mediate the dispute over the State Road memorial for Nicole Lee Schwartz. Some neighbors had found the memorial morbid, said Patty-Pat Kozlowski, legislative aide to Krajewski.

"It's a hard case," she said.

One way or another, the family wants to have a plaque there, at least.

"If one person sees that and decides, 'I'm never going to drink because that beautiful girl was taken here,' " Schwartz-Corsey said, "then it served its purpose."