Helena Died An Underclass Death
She was buried after a funeral conducted in a huge old granite church - St. Mary’s - where the center aisle is the length of a football field and the sheer size of the cathedral dwarfed the handful who came to recall the short, sad life of Helena Gardner, victim of the street. At the altar, the Rev. Arthur Johnson offered ancient ritual as fresh balm for the violent shock of murder, while an organist’s music echoed through an empty canyon of muffled prayer.
The service was held in the same church where Gardner was baptized as a baby 19 years ago. The casket was driven to St. Mary’s from the McAuliffe Funeral Home, next to the apartment building where her family lived before moving to Delaware.
“All she wanted was friends,” her mother Dores Gardner said. “She was a sweetheart. She was not retarded like they are saying. She was about 8 years old socially. She was delayed, but she wasn’t stupid. We had her tested.
“She wanted her own apartment. She wanted people to like her and not make fun of her. The last time I saw her was March 22. She came home on the train from Boston. We made cookies.”
Many popular magazines and newspapers recently devoted a lot of space to reconstructing the lives of the warped fools who killed themselves after two deranged adults calling themselves Bo and Peep told them there was a spaceship with room for all hiding behind a comet.
But you could multiply those 39 pathetic suicides by 10,000 and still not approach the number of Helena Gardners among us this morning, beneath bridges and inside cardboard boxes, their lives unraveling right in front of a culture where just about the worst thing you can ever be is mentally ill and homeless.
On March 21, Gardner spent her last night in Lawrence, Mass., at the Daybreak Shelter. It is a one-story, clapboard building surrounded by a chain-link fence. It’s located at the end of a dead-end road.
She had been a client of the shelter, which offers food and beds for 30, since she returned from Delaware three years ago. At first, she used a fake ID with the name Sylvia Vasquez to get in because Daybreak only treats people over 18.
She was drawn to Daybreak for one very big reason: Her father, Arthur Gagne, was a chronic alcoholic who stayed there when he was not on the street. The father’s life was alcohol and remained so until he ran from his daughter and ran from his hometown all the way to Florida, where he finally fell to the street in a stupor and was killed by a car two years ago.
Helena Gardner barely completed her sophomore year of high school in Delaware. Her mother would drive to the shelter, pick up her daughter in the middle of the day, take her to the bleak, first-floor apartment on Eutaw Street with the drawn blinds and the barking dog so Helena could baby-sit or do the wash before the mother would return her at nightfall to perhaps the one place where a lost, little girl in a big girl’s body found true comfort and real companionship.
At the shelter, she would often ask to stay after the older clients departed each morning. She would work in the kitchen or laundry and dance around the property wearing a Sony Walkman, singing to music no one else could hear.
“She was very needy,” a social worker said. “But she was no trouble. She was treated like everyone’s little sister.”
On March 26, however, her innocence, her naivete, her juvenile hopes, her soap opera dreams and her life were devoured in a horrifying homicide. It is claimed that Nicole Fernandes, also 19 and unbalanced, along with two homeless men, tied Helena Gardner to a chair inside an abandoned trailer in Cambridge and slowly and methodically beat, taunted, and tortured her before they crushed her skull with a sledge hammer, covered her with a blanket and set her on fire while she was still alive. Any motive is meaningless.
She remained in the morgue, unclaimed and unidentified, until last week when terrific police work solved both mysteries. And so, on a chilly April Friday, Helena Gardner came home one last time for the solace of a service offered in memory of a little girl who could not grow up and who spent a short, anonymous life seeking simple friendships in a violent world where she was born poor and died lonely.