Memorial service held for girl, 6, struck by car

By RHONDA COOK

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Suk Maya Monger was memorialized Thursday, two weeks after her family relocated to the United States and two days after she was hit and killed by a Lincoln Navigator as she crossed the street.

According to Ellen Beattie, executive director of the International Rescue Committee, the family were refugees from Nepal still trying to take care of the basics of living in the United States in a Clarkston apartment.

At the time of the incident, Suk Maya’s brother and father were applying for Social Security numbers.

They didn’t yet speak English.

And they had no money.

A Decatur funeral home assumed the cost of cremating the 6-year-old’s body and donated cost of a memorial service and people have rushed to help them.

A few hours before Suk Maya’s service, 44-year-old Gregory Armwood was released on a $2,000 signature bond from the DeKalb County Jail, where he surrendered around 9:30 a.m. to face charges related to the girl’s death.

At 11:20 a.m., Armwood and his attorney walked silently past news reporters and photographers waiting outside the jail, refusing to answer questions.

Armwood is charged with vehicular homicide and failure to exercise due care, both misdemeanors that carry maximum sentences of 12 months.

Police say Armwood, of Covington, illegally passed a stopped car and MARTA bus. At the same moment, Suk Maya and her mother had just walked in front of the bus and stepped into an open lane on Ponce de Leon to cross the street.

Suk Maya died early Wednesday of head and internal injuries.

She and her brother were to have started at Indian Creek Elementary on Wednesday.

The Mongers came to the United States under a U.S. government program that provides a haven for people from countries where they are persecuted.

The Monger family were qualified under that program.

The family was “forcibly displaced” from their home in Bhutan because of “ethnic cleansing.” Though the Monger’s had not lived in Nepal, they were of Nepalese descent and consequently were among tens of thousands pushed out of Bhutan, Beattie said.

The Mongers lived in a hut in a Nepal refugee camp for 10 years. The camp had no schools, and refugees were not allowed to work so they depended on relief organizations for food, according to Beattie.

Suk Maya was born in the camp, where about 200,000 Nepalese refugees lived.

The Mongers borrowed money from a United Nations program to cover the cost of coming to the United States. The family is expected to be self-supporting within six months and that money must be repaid.

In the meanwhile, Beattie said, the IRC will move the family to another apartment. Suk Maya was hit near their current home, and it’s a permanent reminder of the tragedy.

“The mother is very, very distraught on top of a lot of other things they went through,” Beattie said. “She is very much in shock and has not been able to accept that she will never see her daughter again.”