Remembering Barway: A statue on a Crystal playground will celebrate his life and legacy

Children ran giggling around Becker Park, dashing from the swings to the slides to the splash pad and back.

From her seat at a picnic table, Louise Karluah could see her 9-year-old, Teddy, scaling the climbing wall. Beyond Teddy, across the street, she could see the apartment complex where her 10-year-old, Barway, had lived and died.

She comes here to remember, sometimes. To this playground in Crystal, a city that never forgot Barway Collins.

Crystal plans to raise a statue of Barway on this playground soon. The thought fills Karluah with gratitude.

"I'm so happy and glad that people remember him," she said. Her youngest, Lucelia, just weeks away from her first birthday, toddled across the picnic table in a sparkly pink tutu. "If people talk about him, that's a blessing from God."

This playground was just a field eight years ago, when Barway stepped off a school van and vanished. It served as a staging area for the search crews and volunteers that went out day after day and week after week — until they found him. His father confessed and is serving 40 years for killing his child.

It's a blessing to hear someone speak the name of a child lost to violence, Karluah believes. So many of them have slipped our minds. Forgive us, Trinity, Aniya and Ladavionne. Forgive us, Eli, Marleisha, Antwan, Sadie and Shiway, Manuel.

But in Crystal, they still speak Barway's name. Erin and Jeff Kolb worked for years to raise money and support for the memorial. Hundreds of people raised more than $21,000 to keep his memory close. Last September, Karluah addressed the Crystal City Council to give the project and statue design her approval.

Barway was 10 years old. He was so full of life. It's his life that his mother wants to remember. And as a sculptor works on the statue, she dreams about raising funds for a school named after her son, back in Liberia.

Karluah works six days a week as a caregiver at a group home. She's taken on extra shifts because it's Lucelia's first birthday this month and she wants to give her a nice party.

"I love to care for people, that's where my heart is," she said. But this country does not pay caregivers what they're worth, so now that Lucelia is a little older, Karulah plans to return to school to earn a nursing degree.

At the playground, on her only day off, she talked with chaplain Howard Dotson of the Twin Cities Crisis Response Team about the school she hopes to build in Liberia someday. A school with a curriculum designed to help children hurt by generations of civil war.

"I was trying to do something to leave in his name, for his memory, for people to remember," said Karulah, who was in living in Liberia when Barway was killed by the one person who should have kept him safe.

Dotson has been helping the family for years, and hopes to aid in fundraising for the school once the statue goes up and even more of us remember Barway.

"I told Louise, 'You are my Easter story,'" said Dotson, catching little Lucelia as she barreled across the picnic table toward him. "Out of tragedy comes hope."