Notes:
Slain Boy Is Buried In Chesco Friends Mourn Youth Shot While Riding Bike
By Pam Belluck, Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted: August 20, 1991
The burial suit was a T-shirt - black and emblazoned with the logo from the movie Days of Thunder.
Stuffed animals nestled in the coffin.
And the cards arranged near the body said, "Happy Birthday" and ''Congratulations on Turning 14."
That's how old Thomas Adam Mumma - known to everyone as Adam - would have been if he had not been shot in the back and killed while riding his dirt bike Wednesday on a country road near his northern Chester County home.
Nineteen-year-old Fernando Antonio Garcia of Harleysville has been charged with murder. According to a police affidavit, Garcia admitted on Thursday that he shot Adam.
Children so young shouldn't have to die.
That was the deafening undertone at Adam Mumma's funeral yesterday.
"The death of a child is undoubtedly the most difficult experience any of us have to deal with in this life," said the Rev. John C. Kolle, pastor of the church Adam attended regularly with his family and the only person to speak at the funeral service.
It was a shimmering August day, the kind of day when children are supposed to be at the park or the beach, squeezing the last sweet drops out of summer before school starts.
But in Pottstown, the simple brick funeral home was filled with dozens of youngsters, many of whom were expecting to enter Owen J. Roberts High School with Adam this fall.
There were kids in suits that were either too baggy or too tight, their ties clumsily knotted and their faces showing the shadows of their first beards.
There were kids in jeans and high-top sneakers, shoving their hands down in their pockets and staring at the floor.
There were kids who had been driven to the funeral by their parents, kids who probably never had to attend a funeral before.
And there were the pallbearers, who with the exception of Adam's 17-year- old brother, Joe, could not have been older than 15. It took eight of them to hoist and carry the heavy, burnished wood coffin from the hearse to the graveside.
On the hill above the flat land of the cemetery was a shopping mall, a symbol of the comfortable, safe suburbs that are supposed to protect people
from dying the way Adam did.
What kind of eulogy is there for a boy who died at 13.
Mr. Kolle tried to find words.
"We had no choice in what happened last week," he said. "But we have control over how we will respond. Will we become bitter? Will we become filled with hatred? . . . We pray that if that root of bitterness has begun to grow that God will pull it out."
There were some youngsters who were not there to hear Mr. Kolle's words: the eight teenagers who said they were out driving with Garcia on the day Adam was shot.
But Richard Steele, the father of one of the teenagers, was there, standing silently, a little apart from the others.
Steele, who lives in Pottstown, was the one who convinced his son and the others to go to the police last week. And it was Steele who said he found Garcia and wrestled with him on a local basketball court, pinning him down until police could come and arrest him.
After the burial, members of Adam's family noticed Steele. One by one, they composed themselves, walked over to Steele and hugged him.
"Thank you so much for turning (Garcia) in," said Adam's grandfather Jay Mumma. "Don't let anyone give you any trouble over this. You let us know if you have any trouble. You let us know."
Steele was in tears.
Possible living individual, birth date and location removed!