All around the sanctuary was the color pink -- and cries of mourning.
Pink carnations and roses surrounded a tiny white casket. Atop it, a pale pink teddy bear was nestled in a spray of pale pink roses.
Inside lay the body of 2-year-old Jazmin A’mya Green in pink dress as frothy as cotton candy, her tiny braids threaded with hot-pink beads.
Her little hands clasped a single silk rose.
Just a few feet away, Jazmin's parents, Charles Green and April McAlister, convulsed in grief as a parade of mourners filed Saturday past the open casket inside Divine Faith Ministries International in Jonesboro.
One mourner could be heard asking, “Why, Lord?” Another leaned in to gently kiss the child’s forehead.
‘Why’ is a question that has been asked since Monday, when Green died after she was left in a van outside Marlo’s Magnificent Early Learning Center after returning from a field trip. The child was among the eight children who went on the field trip.
The day care operator and a staffer are accused of falsifying records that relate to the child’s death, according to court documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Clayton County police are still investigating how the little girl could be left in the van for two hours before she was discovered missing.
Court records also suggest that more than an hour passed after she was found and 911 was called.
But answers were in short supply inside Divine Faith.
Friends and family members came forward to talk about a child who loved to go trick-or-treating, who would hardly sit still as she had her hair braided, who loved to play with her brother. Their tributes to the child were often cut short by their sobs.
“A person’s death at a young age shatters our dreams for them,” said Rev. Donny D. Green, a family member who delivered the little girl’s eulogy.
Jazmin could have gone to college and become a lawyer, a police chief, maybe even president, Green said. Those images of who the child might have become hung in contrast to the images of her displayed on screens in front of the church. There were shots of the child frolicking in a swimming pool, sitting on her mother’s lap at a family cookout, of her making silly faces for the camera.
“Lord no. Lord no,” McAlister moaned. “They were supposed to take care of my baby. They were supposed to take care of my baby.”
And when the eulogy was done and the song “Since I Laid My Burden Down” was sung, three funeral attendants in black tuxedos and top hats carried the white casket outside.
There, at the end of a red carpet, waited an open-air carriage, its bed swathed in white tulle. Two white horses stood waiting to take the 2-year-old to a cemetery a few miles away.
The funeral home director said it was the sort of send-off “every princess deserves.”
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