D.C. murder victims buried at Heritage cemetery by Sherice Taylor, whose son was killed
Sherice Taylor parked her black Volvo with the dented bumper at the entrance of Heritage Memorial Cemetery and waited to meet the hearse carrying D.C.’s 184th homicide victim.
It was a brisk Thursday afternoon in early November, and frost covered the grass of the cemetery in southern Maryland. Men in backhoes gouged burial plots in the ground, their breath clouding with each exhale.
Taylor, dressed in black, as she always is, paid little attention to the creation of fresh graves. At Heritage, her life revolves around death. For more than a decade, she’s helped arrange the burials of thousands of people: those who have died of cancer and covid, heart attacks and car crashes, strokes and Alzheimer’s. And most senseless of all, the victims of gun violence.
When grieving families arrive in Taylor’s office, they are seeking an affordable, but respectable, burial made possible by the city’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, which pays up to $10,000 to help with funeral costs for homicide victims. She understands their pain, though she doesn’t always share why.
Now, the hearse turned into the cemetery, trailed by a long line of cars. Taylor guided the mourners to a green awning in the Garden of Reflection. She stopped and scanned the crowd for the father of Eric Cooper — the 27-year-old who had been shot to death a week earlier outside his aunt’s home in Northeast Washington, leaving behind a 3-year-old son.
Taylor, 50, clutched a clipboard of paperwork for Eric’s father to sign. She was proud of her job as a family service counselor at Heritage, an 81-acre cemetery in Waldorf, about 30 miles outside of the District.
She’d helped make Heritage a destination for dozens of families burying the casualties of D.C.'s relentless gun violence — a worsening epidemic that has taken the lives of more than 200 people in the nation’s capital this year alone and 775 others in the previous five.
“I started from scratch here,” Taylor said. “Left a corporate job, had no insurance, just to help this cemetery get started. I recognize almost everyone [buried] here.”
Near Eric Cooper’s gravesite were the headstones of so many others lost to shootings: a 28-year-old man who died shielding a friend from gunfire, a 21-year-old Starbucks barista who dreamed of college before his murder, and an 18-year-old — nicknamed ‘Numba Nine’ after his lucky number — who was struck by a bullet a few blocks from Nationals Park.
A throng of pallbearers slid Eric’s casket from the hearse and carried it several feet, placing it on a stand near two rows of gray folding chairs. Eric’s younger sister settled in a front seat, placing her infant son’s car seat on the ground and rocking it with one foot. His brother uncorked a bottle of sparkling pink wine and sprayed it over the casket, now smudged with fingerprints and adorned with red roses.
Taylor spotted the man’s father, Eric Hemphill, and darted toward him. She was the mother of five children — four of them boys — and Cooper had been the same age as one of her own kids. She touched Hemphill’s arm, explaining the coincidence.
“I want to talk to you,” Hemphill, 47, said. “About my son. About all of it.”
“You will,” Taylor said, handing him the paperwork. “My card is in here.”
She knew what he was going through. The youngest of her sons was buried in this same cemetery. He’d been shot and killed a year earlier.
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‘Sunshine baby’
At first, Taylor had refused to visit the gravesite.
She’d buried Juan Ross under the shade of an old Bradford pear tree, in the plot next to her mother, who died in 2013. When families arrived at Heritage to plan a burial, Taylor would hand them a map and gesture across the mowed lawns to the bright flag marking their site, which she always asked a groundsman to place ahead of time.
“Please forgive me, but my son is buried down there, and I’m just not ready yet,” she’d tell them.
In her absence, grass overtook the brown rectangle of dirt where the 23-year-old’s casket had been sunk into the ground. In the seven months before his headstone arrived to solidify her loss, Taylor could almost pretend like her son wasn’t dead.
They’d always shared a special bond. She’d called Juan her “sunshine baby.” At his fifth-grade graduation, Taylor had laughed from the audience as he performed Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” dancing and tossing pastel game money in the air. For his 21st birthday, they’d flown to Las Vegas, where she taught him to gamble responsibly, always stopping at investing $20.
Taylor had raised him in Columbia and Waldorf, where he’d graduated high school, but Juan liked to tell people that he was from Pittsburgh, like his mother, and so his nickname became “Pitt.”
At the time of his death on Oct. 4, 2020, he was living in Columbia with his girlfriend of eight years — they’d been dating since high school — and working in the warehouse of a company that manufactures interior moldings and doors. As a teenager, he’d been arrested in Charles County on drug charges and pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon. He was sentenced to probation before judgment and was trying to get his record expunged just before the shooting.
When Taylor heard that her son had been shot, she sped the 50 miles to Howard County. She found him lying in a parking lot, partially covered by a sheet under a police tent.
“I started running down the sidewalk,” Taylor said. “The police officer grabbed me at the tape.”
She recognized Juan by his red-and-black sneakers. His face was turned away from her, his head resting in a smear of blood. His ankles were delicately crossed, as though, she said, “he was at peace.”
“I was fixated on his shoes,” she remembered. “His feet — it was amazing to me, just so tender, how they were crossed.”
He was shot in a suburb half way between Washington and Baltimore that recorded only seven homicides in 2020.
According to Howard County police, Juan was running an errand with two boys, whom he and his girlfriend mentored after their mother died of a drug overdose. He was shot while they were walking across the parking lot of an apartment complex. Taylor said Juan told the boys to run, saving their lives.
Detectives said in a news release that they believed Juan was targeted in the shooting and that it “was not random.”
A month later, police arrested Daquante Thomas, 18, and Tyrik Braxton, 24, for first and second-degree murder, assault and conspiracy to commit murder. Both men have pleaded not guilty to the charges, according to their attorneys.
According to the criminal indictment, Juan may have been killed because of a dispute he was having with a man over drugs and an affair with that man’s girlfriend.
His mother said she is waiting to learn more at the trial, which is scheduled for next month. She’s already started thinking about the victim impact statement she’ll write if the men are convicted.
Until then, she’s trusting that the police are doing their job and that God will help her through her most painful moments.
Taylor funnels her grief into helping other families navigate the bureaucracy of death: the paperwork, the phone calls, the insurance claims, the reimbursement checks.
She follows news reports about fatal shootings in the capital and recognizes the names of homicide victims when their families arrive in her office.
She knows that they rely on money from the Crime Victims Compensation Program, which the D.C. Superior Court established in 1996. Funded by court fees and traffic fines, the program pays out around $5.3 million annually for the burials of homicide victims, grief counseling for their families, reimbursement of lost wages and other costs.
“I don’t know if people realize that a burial and a funeral cost thousands of dollars,” said D.C. Councilman Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who has pushed to expand the program. “Coming up with that money in a matter of a few days can put a family in debt, frankly. Having a program like this helps make sure that we are providing resources to a family on what is probably one of the worst days of their life.”
Many families from the District choose Heritage for its modest prices — $3,295 to $7,195 compared with $8,000 to $10,000 at many other cemeteries.
When the cemetery was founded in 2008, it had only 49 headstones and some trees. Now it’s divided into four gardens with names like “Devotion” and “Serenity,” promising a more peaceful end than the gun violence victims experienced in life. The property stretches to blinking communication towers on the horizon, at the edge of a state forest.
Taylor’s own loss is never far from mind. She polishes her toenails in pink to spell out her son’s name: J-U-A-N. In the back seat of her Volvo — amid a jumble of extra flats and sandals, lest she break a high heel in the cemetery’s soft soil — she keeps a baseball cap embroidered with ‘LAS VEGAS.’
And on quiet afternoons, she sends long messages to his cellphone, which is still in custody of Howard County Police: “Man, I really miss you saying ‘Ma.’ I love you and hope to see you soon.”
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‘Nothing can heal this wound’
As Taylor talked to Eric Cooper’s father, a boy sprinted past them and plowed face-first into a pile of dirt twice his height.
“Hey!” Hemphill said, interrupting the conversation to chide one of his grandsons.
He helped pull the boy out of the soil and pat him clean. Hearing the commotion, 3-year-old Zyon peered around his mother’s legs to watch them, then reached for his grandfather, too. In his shiny red and black vest, he blended into the crowd of family and friends who’d donned the same colors — lipstick, sneakers, puffy jackets, jewelry — to honor his dead father.
Hemphill scooped the boy into his arms, finding just as much comfort in the embrace as the 3-year-old did.
His son’s death has left Hemphill afraid to go outside at night, afraid to imagine the fate that might await him, and possibly even his 13 grandchildren. In the deadliest year for gun violence in the District since 2003, his son’s murder had largely been overlooked, amounting to just five sentences in The Washington Post. No arrests have been made in the case. But to his family, Eric meant so much.
Hemphill had taken some time off from his job as a security guard at Georgetown University Hospital to help them through the grieving process.
“It’s just prison and death, prison and death,” Hemphill told anyone that would listen. “I’m scared of this cycle. I can’t save everybody.”
Hemphill had been imprisoned for much of his son’s childhood for assault and subsequent parole violations. The boy had grown up in the same neighborhood Hemphill had, near the Deanwood Recreation Center, a part of Northeast D.C. that Hemphill felt was changing for the worse. He stayed connected to Eric through short visits and even shorter letters.
“How are you?” Eric had written to his dad in one childhood letter. “I past to the 4th grade. I miss you. I know my time tabels. I am good in math. I love you and miss you very much.”
In another note, he drew a messy heart in red crayon, then continued: “Dear Dad, I miss you so much. I am writeing you back. Love, Eric.”
Hemphill had saved these cards, along with dozens of programs from the funerals of various family members: his brother who had been stabbed on the block they’d grown up on in 2006; a 15-year-old nephew who had been stabbed in the neck at the Deanwood Metro Station in 2010; his 80-year-old uncle who had been walking down the street last year when he was attacked and beaten by a man high on PCP.
None hurt Hemphill as much as the Oct. 28 shooting that killed his son, whom everyone called “Little Eric.”
“How can you prepare yourself to be burying your child?” he asked. “My heart is gone. Nothing can heal this wound.”
He remembered Eric as the scrawny boy who’d played Pop Warner football and attended Maya Angelou High, who used to carry around his pet iguana, Redz, on his head, splitting oatmeal cream pies with the reptile. His son could be “the life of your party, or the demise of your party,” Hemphill said, recalling Eric’s big personality and quick temper.
Eric and his three brothers were so rowdy that their grandfather nicknamed them the “Four Horsemen.” They loved spending time with their cousins, who were about the same age. When one cousin was shot and killed in Buffalo, Eric honored him by choosing his name as the middle name for Zyon: Jeremiah.
Although he’d faced his own arrests for robbery in 2016 and 2018, Eric loved his son and vowed to be a good father, one who was supportive and present. Even while incarcerated, he tried to call him everyday so the little boy could hear his voice.
“As a dad, he was, oh my goodness, just overly protective,” said his sister, Gabrielle Cooper, 26. “Whenever Zyon needed him, he was there. He never tried to miss a day.”
Now, a woman crouched next to the fatherless boy — convinced that his dad “was just sleeping” — and held out a wicker basket containing three doves. Zyon stared at the birds, transfixed.
Behind Zyon, his aunts and uncles emptied the last of the pink sparkling wine onto his father’s coffin. They used car keys to carve ‘I love you’ on its lacquered surface and removed the bouquet of red roses, kissing the spot where the flowers had rested.
Zyon patted the lid of the wicker basket.
“They go in the sky?” he asked. “They fly?”
“Yes,” Hemphill said, rubbing his shoulder.
Zyon opened the lid and released the birds. He watched as the doves cut across the clear autumn sky and disappeared.
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Same age, same name
By the next morning, Taylor already had six appointments and four burials scheduled. On her computer, she scanned a list of the dead. A familiar name caught her eye just as a groundsman entered her office.
The man had been shot in Southeast D.C. five days before Eric Cooper, and police had already charged someone in the killing.
What startled Taylor wasn’t the circumstances of his death, but his name: Juwan Michael Smith.
“He’s 23 years old,” Taylor commented to the groundsman. “Same age as Juan. Same name as Juan — only he spells it with a ‘w.’"
“Oh wow,” the groundsman said.
Smith was D.C.'s 179th homicide victim this year. His family was burying him that day: site 1542B.
Taylor wrote the mother’s phone number down in pen on an orange sticky note. Grabbing her walkie-talkie and keys, she left her office to meet them.
Outside, the ground was matted with damp leaves. A few members of Juwan Smith’s family had arrived early and idled in a line near her office. Music blasted from their car stereos. Two young children in winter coats danced in the grass.
Taylor drove past them in her black Volvo and again parked near the cemetery’s entrance.
She waited for the hearse to arrive.
Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Brandon Standley. Design by Chloe Meister.
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