Mourners pay their respects to victims of Payson-area flash flood
The 10 family members were dressed in white, in caskets each adorned with a single rose.
Nobody could remember seeing 10 caskets at once.
Not the pastor at St. Patrick Catholic Community, who opened his church’s doors because the grieving family’s own church could not hold them all.
Not the funeral director, who coordinated teams of mortuaries and volunteers for the largest funeral he’d ever organized.
There weren’t enough vases to hold all the flowers. The white caskets took up most of the space in the center of the sanctuary. Their photos filled two tables in the foyer, surrounded by white gifts brought by whispering mourners.
“I gived this one to her,” said a little girl in a pink dress, holding a doll that sat in front of a photo of 5-year-old Mia Garnica.
“The last time I saw him was like a month ago,” said another, running a finger over the portrait of 19-year-old Javier Raya-Garcia.
The girls shuffled along the table. They stopped at a photo of the entire family. It had been taken at some happy unknown time, before a flash flood crashed through a birthday party near Payson and killed 10 of the people smiling in that photo.
Funeral services for the family began with a Monday evening visitation at St. Patrick Catholic Community in Scottsdale. A funeral Mass was to take place Tuesday.
Invitations for the visitation listed a 5 p.m. start time. By then, surviving family members had been in the pews for three hours and about 100 mourners had filtered around the ring of caskets as projection screens flashed family photos. Spanish gospel music played in the background, muffling scattered cries and wails from the bathroom.
Some visitors wore funeral black, but most came straight from a Monday at work, dressed as they were to say goodbye to the 10 people who died as they were, taken away by a wave of water and ash while they celebrated another year of life.
Now those 10 people wore suits and dresses of pure white, laid in white caskets underneath 53 white lights in the center of the sanctuary:
- Emily Garnica, 3, and Mia Garnica, 5, with necklaces of flowers hung around their neck.
- Daniel Garnica, 7, with a stuffed Tigger wedged between his body and the casket’s frame.
- Hector Miguel Garnica, 27, whose body had been found four days after the flood and who now lay in the only closed casket.
- Maria Raya-Garcia, 27, whose fingernails were painted black.
- Selia Garcia Casteneda, 57, between her children with a silver clip in her blonde hair.
- Maribel Raya-Garcia, 24, with a silver band holding back her hair.
- Javier Raya-Garcia, 19, and Jonathan Leon, 13, whose hands held silver rosaries.
- Erica Raya-Garcia, the youngest at 2 years old, with a princess blanket draped over the foot of her casket.
Tied to each one was a single rose and a single note: "Sleep with the Angels."
“Fifteen years and I’ve never see one this tragic,” said Messinger Mortuary’s Russ Persinger.
As one of the largest Catholic churches in the Valley, St. Patrick holds dozens of funerals in its sanctuary each year, welcoming people to the quiet routine of grief: Mourners enter, spend a moment at the casket, say a kind word to the family and move on.
But on Monday, one goodbye still left nine more.
Supported by a daughter on either side, an elderly woman moved toward Emily Garnica’s casket, the first in a line that stretched around the center of the sanctuary. Slowly she approached.
When she reached the open casket and saw Emily’s necklace of flowers, she collapsed. The woman’s daughters held her up, and she reached a hand in, stroking the little girl’s lifeless face. Choking a sob, she moved to the next casket, again falling against her daughters when she saw the face inside.
After five caskets, she turned away. Her daughters guided their mother back to an empty pew, where the three women sat holding each other, heaving silently, with five caskets still to go.
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