Hidden at the end of rutted and pot holed Mossier Valley Road, Our Garden of Angels is a unique memorial to both life and death, a place that was never really planned but simply grew out of the grief of a mourning grandmother and friends who helped her. This is more than a roadside memorial. Rather, it is a quiet, manicured, softly-lit half-acre with a brick walkway, concrete benches and a man-made waterfall spilling into a shallow pool. Newly planted live oaks and pear trees will soon provide shade, and the crepe myrtle bushes that border the area will burst into bloom. And there are the white, wooden crosses, 80 of them, erected in honor of those whose lives were claimed by violence.

Carolyn Barker started attending the twice-monthly meetings of Families of Murder Victims, determined to attend the trials of the men who had killed Amy Robinson, her granddaughter. Carolyn reached out for help to Ray Stewart, who had founded FOMV.

He sat with her through the proceedings as the grim and senseless death of her mentally challenged granddaughter was revisited.

Amy, who suffered from a genetic disorder called Turner's syndrome, had been on her bicycle, en route to her job as a grocery sacker at an Arlington, Texas grocery store on a day in February, 1998, when self-proclaimed racists Robert Neville and Michael Hall decided to find a black person to kill. Unable to locate the particular youth they had planned to murder, they were driving along Division Street in Arlington when they saw Amy. Part Cherokee and dark-skinned, she became the target of the hate crime they were determined to commit. Promising her a ride to work, they put her bicycle in the back of their pickup, stopped to purchase wine coolers for themselves and a soft drink for Amy, then drove to the isolated area at the end of Mossier Valley Road on the far eastern edge of Tarrant County.

There they tortured Amy, shooting her with a pellet gun and a crossbow before Neville ended her suffering with a shot from a .22-caliber rifle. They left her body lying in a field of weeds beneath an electrical tower, laughing as they drove away. "I guess she'll be a little late for work," Hall later admitted saying.

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11271 Mossier Valley Road
Euless, Texas 76040
gardenofangelTX@aol.com (Email)
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The MIDI you are listening to is "You're at Peace in His Love"
by Elton Smith and Larry Holder