May 30, 2022
Meet The Man Personalizing Caskets For The Children Killed In The Uvalde School Shooting.
Custom casket-maker Trey Ganem is among the professionals providing funeral services to the victims’ families free of charge.
It’s an enormous task for a small town with its limited local resources to memorialize 21 people back-to-back, and the charge becomes even more daunting when 19 of them are children.
The race to supply caskets for 19 children began when Ganem, of SoulShine Industries, responded to messages on Facebook and a few calls from people in the death care industry, including one from someone at the Texas Funeral Directors Association asking for help.
But smaller caskets are rarely stocked in bulk. So Ganem, who is based in Edna, Texas, near the Gulf Coast, had to order them from a manufacturer in Griffin, Georgia, potentially jeopardizing on-time deliveries for grieving families whose funeral services would start within a week.
Ganem said the manufacturer worked for 20 hours straight to get the orders out on time. Then his close friend Bubba Hoffman hired a Texas trucking company to make the 26-hour trip from Texas to Georgia and then back to Texas.
When the delivery arrived at 2 a.m. Friday, Ganem and his son Billy Ganem worked nonstop, getting only a couple of hours of sleep.
The father and son usually manage the shop alone, but Trey Ganem said as many as a dozen people volunteered to help, some of whom traveled to Edna from as far as Corpus Christi, Texas, to help paint, sand, and apply vinyl to the child-size caskets.
By Saturday, the crew was making the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Uvalde from Edna to donate eight completed caskets.
Ganem expects to deliver the remaining caskets Sunday. In all, he prepared 19 caskets for Uvalde victims: 18 of the 19 children and one adult.
Smart WiFi Video Doorbell Camera Wireless Home Security Phone Door Ring Bell
