Wheat Ridge – The casket sitting at the front of the room was only 4 feet long, cut short like an incomplete sentence.
Cut short like Deion Santistevan’s life.
It rested upon a tall side table because it was too small for the stands the mortuary normally uses. And on Sunday, those who approached – to see the bright orange flowers and the teddy bear on top, to see the boy’s favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys lying next to, almost guarding, Deion inside – came with pain and came with questions.
“I want to kiss him, and I want to touch him,” one woman wailed as she looked upon the 5-year-old. “But I can’t reach him.”
“I love you so much,” she cried to him.
“It’s such a hard day for all of us,” Eloy Trujillo, Deion’s grandfather, said later. “It’s like living a nightmare. I don’t want to believe he’s gone.”
Deion died the afternoon of Aug. 7 when his father, Elias Santistevan, shot him in the head, then took his own life during a standoff with police.
On Sunday, at Deion’s viewing at the Olinger Crown Hill Mortuary, Trujillo couldn’t even bring himself to say Elias Santistevan’s name.
The family tried hard to block out the anger over how Deion died and instead focus on the smiling little boy they all remembered. In the foyer of the mortuary were a half dozen pieces of posterboard covered in pictures of Deion – at Halloween dressed up like Shrek, grinning in his high chair, goofing around in his plaid pajama pants, laughing next to his mother.
But in quiet conversations outside the chapel, the anger and confusion over Deion’s death was inescapable.
“Why would he do that? Why would he shoot his own son?” Trujillo asked. “We’ve just got to try to remember the happy memories with Deion.”
Lucy Gonzales, the great-grandmother whom Deion always called “Grandma Turtle” for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys she gave him, said the senselessness of the death made it that much more painful.
“We’ve all got to go,” she said, “but not that little. Not at 5 years old.”
And then there was Jeff Barela, Elias Santistevan’s uncle. Barela said he couldn’t bear to think that Santistevan had killed his own son.
“It’s horrible,” Barela said. “I can’t even describe it. I’m trying to be strong. I didn’t even want to go in.”
Today at 1:30 p.m. at Holy Ghost Catholic Church, the family will attend the funeral Mass, saying a final goodbye to Deion.
But before that, there was something Eloy Trujillo said he needed to do.
Near the end of the viewing, he picked up Yariah, Deion’s 2-year-old sister, and walked toward the front of the room, toward Deion’s tiny casket. As her grandfather whispered into her ear, Yariah looked around at the people gathered, she glanced at the cartoons – Deion’s favorite cartoons – playing on a TV next to the casket and she pointed at the Spider-Man balloon hovering overhead. Finally, she took a long look inside the casket, at her brother.
“She doesn’t realize what’s happened,” Trujillo said. “But she had to see him. … I just didn’t want her to ever wonder what happened to her brother.”
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
