Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Rebeca Navarro-McKelvey remembers Managua’s sunlit streets and the Nicaraguan music that played from every open doorway and the buttery avocados that dropped from trees in her front yard.
She also remembers tripping over the dead body of a teenage boy and her mother picking her up and carrying her through an air raid. He was, she now realizes, a Sandinista rebel, killed by the Nicaraguan National Guard.
Rebeca’s mother was an attorney who worked in Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s government but cherished President John F. Kennedy’s vision of democracy. Rebeca’s father was an architect, determinedly apolitical. Rebeca, only 5 years old, heard her parents talking late at night: Who could they trust? How would they get out? She was their only child, cherished after six miscarriages. And somehow, they made her feel safe. “I don’t know how!” she says. “’Cause I have three children, and I prosecute sex crimes and child abuse, and I worry constantly. And I know now how terrified they were. But they always said, ‘We’ll take care of it.’”
The Navarros came to Missouri and wound up running a Chinese restaurant in Jefferson City. “For 17 years, we were Hispanic people making Chinese food in the middle of the States,” Navarro-McKelvey says dryly. She went on to law school and then moved from Armstrong Teasdale (toxic torts) to the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office (white-collar crime) to the St. Charles County Juvenile Office. Last year, she joined the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office as assistant circuit attorney, leading the Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Unit.
Ten years earlier, when her first child was 10 months old, she’d heard a news account of a mentally ill woman seen swinging what people thought was a rag doll into the curb. It was the woman’s baby, 2 ½–month–old Destiny Daniels. Navarro-McKelvey called the St. Louis Office of the Medical Examiner. “What happens to babies who die like this?” she asked. The office waited until there were enough of them, she was told, and then a funeral home picked them up and buried them, naked, in an unmarked grave.
Navarro-McKelvey created a nonprofit called Garden of Innocents, and Calvary Cemetery donated land. Since 2003, the nonprofit has buried (and when necessary, named) nearly 30 children. “People come from all over—all races, all creeds—to be present for these babies,” she says. “Church choirs take off work to come and sing. Grandmothers knit booties. Detectives who worked the case come as pallbearers… It’s given me hope.”
