EVERETT, Wash. — A memorial for an Everett woman funded—in part—by the man who killed her has been stolen out of the city’s popular community garden.
52-year-old Jenny McCollum was driving home in February 2003 from the antique shop she owned in town when a teen boy speeding through a downtown Everett intersection struck and killed her as well as two of his young passengers.
He was drunk, and eventually was sentenced to six years in prison. But when he got out, he did something surprising for the McCollum family.
If you’ve never been in Bayside Park’s community garden, then you probably don’t notice anything awry.
But for the people who come there to remember Jenny, the hay bale sitting near its entrance is gut-wrenching.
Mary Belshaw runs the garden.
She says everyone remembers the crash that killed Jenny and two others—and everyone loved the bench her family put in the garden last year as a memorial, now replaced by a hay bale.
Two weeks ago, someone apparently loved it enough to take it.
“You can’t just walk through here and take a bench, you have to have a truck and somebody helping you carry it,” Mary, who discovered the bench missing, told us.
Jenny’s husband talked to us just days after her death in 2003: “I’ll grieve but I won’t grieve in front of the camera,” Jerry McCollum told us then.
The bench was a place for others to grieve—including the man who killed Jenny.
Grant Fosheim—just 19 when he caused the deadly wreck—was the first person to donate to the fund to buy Jenny’s bench; now it’s gone.
“It’s a nice bench; somebody wanted it in their yard probably,” Mary said.
She says they likely didn’t know the old wounds they were re-opening, just like until now you likely didn’t know the heartache attached to the hay bale.
It probably just seemed like a comfortable place to sit.
Jenny's family is looking for information about the theft. If you know anything, you can email her daughter-in-law Connie Becerra at Becerrac75@yahoo.com.
KIRO
