Custom Painted Caskets Remember Kids Killed At Texas Elementary School

UVALDE, TX — When Amerie Jo Garza and Maite Rodriguez were laid to rest Tuesday, Trey Ganem did his part to ensure the two 10-year-old girls would be remembered for more than the terrifyingly awful way they died inside their Uvalde, Texas, school classroom.

Ganem and his SoulShine Industries donated the custom-painted child-size coffins as part of a push organized by Texas Funeral Directors Association president Jimmy Lucas to make grief more bearable for families who are burying the 19 little ones killed in the second-worst U.S. school shooting in modern times. Two teachers were also killed.

The funerals will continue over the next two weeks. As Uvalde navigates unspeakable grief along roiling anger surrounding the police response to the school shooting, Ganem was getting his gut punched 19 times.

On one hand, Ganem — who started Edna, Texas-based SoulShine Industries 11 years ago to help families across the country tell their loved ones’ life stories — is used to it.

“If I don’t get emotional, we’ve got a problem,” he told Patch. “I pour my heart and soul into it, like they were my own kids.”

The designs reflect what delighted these children the most. The coffin of a girl whose dream of becoming a marine biologist was cut short was decorated with dolphins and whales; another had the Superman logo for a kid who didn’t have a cape but was a hero all the same, Ganem said.

“It takes a little bit of their pain and suffering away,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Ganem and his 25-year-old son, Billy, have painted the child-size coffins. The children typically haven’t died in gun violence, he said, although he did provide custom caskets for some of the 26 victims of the 2017 Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting — “another place you don’t expect to have this,” he said.

“It’s very heartbreaking for us,” Ganem said. “This never gets easier. We do caskets for three or four kids a week on average, but 19?

“It tears me up inside,” he said. “I talk to the families, and I have to tell it again when I tell [the crew] what to incorporate. It’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s unreal.”

Though emotionally draining, it’s his job, Ganem said.

“It never gets easy to do what we do, but they have to be perfect,” he said. “We want every kid to have the most beautiful final resting place. It’s a beautiful thing at a traumatic time.”

Ganem told Patch he and his son worked over the Memorial Day weekend to have the caskets ready.

“We’ve been in the paint booth since Friday,” he said

It costs between $3,400 and $3,800 to paint the coffins — unlike other companies that customize caskets, SoulShine doesn't use vinyl wraps.

"We take the casket completely apart, and we paint the hardware, we paint the bars," Ganem told CNN. "The class and the passion that we put into these is bar none."

Ganem and his company are part of an army of volunteers helping families with funerals everyone on the planet agrees came eight, nine or 10 decades before they should have. Also recruited were funeral directors, embalmers and morticians specializing in facial reconstruction to repair some of the damage from the gunman’s military-style assault rifle, Lucas, the Texas Funeral Directors Association president, told NBC News.

“We made sure that they had the best talent possible to take care of these families so that their final farewell could be as good as it could possibly be,” Lucas told NBC News. “How can this family say goodbye, if they choose to see their loved one again, under the best possible scenario? Sometimes that’s easier said than done, especially in this case.”

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