- November 18, 2024
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Keily and Teysha Silva-Roman used to look at the small plastic marker placed at the grave of their mother, Zuheily Rosado, and wish it had a headstone like the others at Craig Flagler Memorial Gardens.
“It was like she wasn’t important,” said 16-year-old Keily Silva-Roman.
Keily said she wanted her mother to have a marker that would last, one that she and her five siblings could one day bring their own children to. She tried to raise the money online, and only made $100.
But Friday, the two sisters unveiled a new stone headstone in a ceremony organized by the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville and attended by coalition members, family friends and law enforcement officials.
Rosado was killed Feb. 21, 2013, when a man walked into the Mobil station she worked in on State Road 100 and shot her. Deputies arrested Joseph F. Bova II, 26, in connection with the murder. Rosado had six children.
The organization’s director, Ann Dugger, had spoken to the girls and reached out to Dwayne Moore of the Southern Monument Company, which donated the 2-foot headstone.
The girls wept after they pulled off the white cloth covering the stone, which has a likeness of Rosado on the front and the names of all of her children on the back.
“It brings closure,” said Teysha Silva-Roman, 17. “We feel that we’ve completed something that … in our minds there was no way. Headstones are high-priced, and I thought, ‘I just started working; there’s no way I can raise all that money.’”
At the ceremony, she read the 23rd Psalm — Rosado always read it to her children before bed — and, with her sister Keily and grandfather Jose Gonzalez, released six doves, each representing one of Rosado’s children, above the grave.
“I felt like I was sending a message to my mom,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like no matter what I say, I feel like she can’t hear me, because I know she’s not here. So when they were released, I felt like … as they fly, that my Mom would know that we do love her, and that we don’t forget her.”
The Justice Coalition also gave the girls tablets, wi-fi hotspots and a year of free internet service to help them with their school work.
“It’s hard to imagine, when a mother has been brutally, unmercifully taken away from her six children, the loneliness that this brings,” Dugger said. “It’s very hard being in school every day when your heart has broken, and it’s very difficult when you feel like everything in your world has been taken away, to keep your mind on your classes.”
Dugger said she hoped the Justice Coalition’s assistance would help the girls move forward.
“I feel this will give these girls a desire to go forward, because they know that people care,” she said.
Teysha said she’d always imagined herself as the first of her siblings to leave home, but also the first to return to care for her mother. Now, she’s caring for her siblings.
“I’ve been trying to stay strong for the longest time,” she said, “And it does affect me. But I have other siblings now that I have to live for.”
