His peers are playing video games or riding their bikes, but Roger Holloway is spending his spring break fulfilling a very personal mission ? giving his infant sister a proper burial.
His father is dead. His mother is in a hospital trying to beat a drug addiction.
So the responsibility for properly naming and burying the sister he never knew, who was stillborn nearly a year ago because of his mother?s drug use, fell squarely on Roger?s 11-year-old shoulders.
Today, thanks to Roger?s determination and the kindness of strangers, the baby girl, known in the official record only as ?Fetus Girl Holloway,? will finally be laid to rest near his home at a Waller cemetery instead of in a pauper?s grave.
And her burial plot will be marked by a 75-pound granite tombstone bearing an angel and the name Rachel Holloway ? a name chosen for her by her brother.
Roger, who lives with his grandmother in Hockley, had rejected the idea of burying his baby sister in the Harris County Cemetery, where the indigent and unclaimed are buried, because he couldn?t make weekly visits to a graveyard far from home.
?I don?t want her to be, like, far away from me,? Roger said. ?I want to visit her every week instead of having to go real far. She?s still my relative. Even if she?s dead, she?s still my sister.?
Roger?s quest to find his sister a resting place began in February after her tiny body had been in storage at the Harris County Medical Examiner?s Office for almost a year.
His mission so touched Virginia Stebbins, a bereavement counselor with the Harris County Social Services Department, that she sought other agencies? assistance to help the boy achieve his goal.
?He is doing everything he can. He has assumed the responsibility of the man in the household,? said Stebbins, whose department supervises the burial of Harris County?s unfortunates ? the indigent, unidentified, abandoned and those with no family or friends to help make funeral arrangements.
?It?s so hard for adults to deal with grief and death. It must be an immense burden for him. An 11-year-old should be out there playing baseball, not trying to bury his baby sister.?