MILLSTADT, Ill. — It was a late Friday afternoon when a team of men approached a tiny pink casket. One wiped his brow. Another stepped away to smoke a cigarette. Then, with calloused hands, they gently lowered the child’s body into the ground.
Earlier that day, the groundskeepers at Sunset Gardens of Memory had dug the small grave up on a hill in a special section of this cemetery in a southern Illinois community across the river from St. Louis. It was for a 3-year-old girl killed by a stray bullet.
“It can be stressful sometimes,” Jasper Belt, 26, said. “We have to use little shovels.”
