CHICAGO — The priest sat near a small white casket, looking at the empty funeral home chapel. A 5-year-old girl's body lay in repose, her head resting on white linen.
It was Thursday, April 7, the morning of the little girl's wake, and no one had come. Father Matt Foley stared at the chapel doors. About half an hour had passed. Where was the family?
Eventually six people showed up, one claiming to be the child's aunt. It wasn't clear who the others were or how they might have known Jessica Chavez.
Foley didn't see Jessica's mother, the desperate woman who had come to him four days earlier saying that her daughter had died at a Kansas City, Mo., hospital and that she couldn't afford to bring the body home to Chicago.
Foley made arrangements to transport the body, covered the costs, set up this wake, a Mass and a proper burial. He asked the aunt and the others of the mother's whereabouts. They said they didn't know, lowered their heads and said no more. He recalls their faces revealing no emotion.
The priest felt it wasn't his place to judge how others chose to grieve. But he couldn't stop wondering how a beautiful 5-year-old child could die and have only six mourners. How could a mother miss her little girl's funeral?
He sat in silence, praying. Who was this little girl? Who was Jessica Chavez?
Police in Kansas City know this much: A woman who identified herself as Mariam Chavez arrived at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City in the early morning of Saturday, April 2, with a 5-year-old girl she said was her daughter, Jessica Chavez. In a police report, an emergency room nurse said it appeared Jessica had been dead for several hours.
Police arrived at the hospital at 3:35 a.m.
A medical examiner would later determine that Jessica had died of natural causes: sepsis, a blood infection, brought on by a severe case of bronchopneumonia. She had marks all over her body that looked like bruises but were a side effect of her illness, not the result of trauma.
"This was a very, very ill child," said Thomas Young, chief investigator at the Jackson County medical examiner's office.
Her death certificate gave few details. She was born Aug. 7, 1999, in Mexico. No city was listed; neither was her father's name.
The woman, speaking broken English, told police she had been living in Chicago while Jessica stayed with relatives in Mexico, but Jessica had fallen ill so Chavez had come to get her, hoping to bring her to a U.S. hospital.
