Monaki Crump spent three months just trying to track down a death certificate for her seventeen-year-old son after he was shot in north city. The bureaucracy took over not long after young Trevon Chapple II collapsed on Goodfellow Boulevard.
City detectives say the teen had been riding in the backseat of a vehicle on January 30 when another passenger, seventeen-year-old Montrell Jeffery, tried to rob him at gunpoint. Trevon bolted into the street, and Montrell opened fire as Crump's doomed son literally ran for his life, according to court records. (Montrell is awaiting trial and remains in custody on $1 million bail.)
The teen died on a Saturday afternoon. No one told Crump. She had heard about a killing on Goodfellow, but the early gossip described the victim as twenty years old. It was only when Trevon's friends began posting remembrances and little angels on Facebook that she grew worried.
She went first to the Jennings Police Department but was sent to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department headquarters on Olive Street. She says officers there had not identified the dead teen and told her to come back on Monday.
She spent the rest of the weekend in a state of suspended belief, hoping in the absence of an official announcement that her son was still alive somewhere. The fantasy ended on Monday morning. She skipped the police department and went straight to the morgue, where an employee showed her the body of a teenager. The boy, laid out flat on a table, was covered to his neck in a sheet.
"It was him," Crump says, quietly retelling the story one afternoon at Lewis and Clark public library.
Crump has stoplight-red hair and a tattoo that says "LOVE HURTS" across her collarbone. Another on the inside of her forearm says "THOU SHALT NOT KILL." The back of her jacket is screenprinted with a picture of Trevon with angel wings.
Crump carries a thick brown folder someone at the funeral home gave her. It is stuffed with all the records she has collected to prove, yes, the second-oldest of her three boys really was murdered and, yes, it really is a nightmare that now spills into her finances. There is a receipt ($1,125) for burial at Lake Charles Park Cemetery & Mausoleum, a program from the homegoing service at Williams Temple Church of God in Christ, a letter from the state Crime Victims' Compensation Program informing her she needs to provide a death certificate, scraps of paper with the price of caskets and a recent addition — the long-awaited death certificate, which leaves off part of her son's name but accurately lists the cause of death as "GUNSHOT WOUND OF THE CHEST."
Crump says she had to wipe out the little savings she had and borrow money from relatives to cover the cost of a funeral and burial.
"I tapped out everything I had," she says. "I didn't want him to sit in that morgue."
A minister told Crump about the state fund a couple of days after Trevon's murder and passed along a number for the Crime Victim Advocacy Center, where she met Meyers.
Crump learned at the end of April her request for funeral costs had been approved. Overall, it is wonderful news, but she had to wait for the official letter, which finally arrived on Monday. She signed it and faxed it back. She says the state told her to expect a check in the next two weeks.
The lengthy process has pushed her to the financial brink. She received a notice her lights would be shut off on Tuesday, she says. She spent Monday scrambling to stop that from happening, and it was only a last-minute donation from a charitable organization that allowed her to keep the electricity flowing for a little while longer.
"It was like, when my son passed, the world stood still," she says. "I forgot I even had bills."
Sorting through the paperwork after Trevon's death was about the last thing she wanted to do, but she had no other choice. She still has his eleven-year-old little brother to raise. So she has slowly built her file with the help of the Crime Victim Advocacy Center and a second caseworker assigned through the Circuit Attorney's Office.
The state fund reimburses a maximum of $25,000 of victims' expenses for things like medical bills, but there are caps for the various eligible categories. Lost wages max out at $400 per week, and the fund will pay no more than $250 for items, such as bedding or clothes, seized as evidence by law enforcement. The cap for funeral services is $5,000.
Trevon's funeral and burial totaled $5,900, so Crump will have to make up the $900 difference.
The fund will not pay the rent or replace damaged property. (No help for bullet-riddled Impalas.) And because the state is a payor of last resort, victims have to prove their costs will not be covered by insurance, workers' compensation, sick leave or other sources.
The state also has to verify applicants are truly victims. That means police reports, assurances from prosecutors or maybe a court decision. To qualify for the fund, the victim must have reported the crime within 48 hours and then cooperate with law enforcement if a suspect is identified.
Each step, every document takes time. Crump says she chased her son's death certificate along a triangular path of entities, making repeated calls to the medical examiner, funeral home and the city Recorder of Deeds before she finally received it on April 28 — three months after Trevon's death.
She knew the state would not take her word that her son was killed without it, but it still seemed ridiculous.
"He was murdered," Crump says. "It was all over the news, so I don't see what the problem is."
