“Her life, a beautiful gift to us, brief but remarkable.”

—Epitaph on the gravestone of Cari Crews

Cari Crews had a thing about pennies, her mother, Risa Crews, said.

She collected them. Shiny new ones, old ones black with grime — she never could pass one up when she saw it lying on the ground. She put them in jars in her room.

DRC/Donna Fielder

Cari Crews lies buried in Roselawn Memorial Park. After her murder, her friends brought pennies and left them on her grave.

It wasn’t the spending she liked about them. It was the finding.

So her friends started dropping pennies where they knew she’d walk, amused to see her pick them up and tuck them away for a journey to her penny jar. If she ever caught on that people who loved her augmented her penny lode, she didn’t let them know.

Later, those same friends brought pennies to her grave. They dropped them on the mound of turned earth so that it glinted with dozens of small sparks when the sun was right.

Soon, so many copper pennies lay in the grass, as it gradually covered the mound, that her mother brought a crystal canister with a cork lid to put them in.

Risa Crews smiled through her tears when she visited the grave and saw the pennies shining through the glass on her daughter’s stone.

Pennies for Cari.

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com .