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Dinner raises funds for kids
By jeanne starmack
girard
An annual spaghetti dinner serves two purposes.
Many who knew Lena Cross and her sons, Mason, 5, and Christian, 22 months, come to the Fraternal Order of Eagles hall in Girard to remember them — it’s a yearly gathering where they socialize, said Cindy Michael.
The dinner also is a fundraiser that helps children, said Michael, who organizes it along with her husband, Ken MacPherson.
It is one of two big events for the Lena, Mason, Christian Memorial Fund. The other is a children’s bookbag giveaway every August in Tod Park.
“It started after their murders,” Michael said Thursday. “We were getting cards and envelopes in the mail with money, and we wondered what to do with it.”
It would have been easy, Michael said, to have descended into grief and stayed there after her grandsons and their mother, her son Joe Pizzulo’s girlfriend, were found dead inside their burned home on Dearborn Avenue the morning of Sept, 13, 2005.
“At the time, I felt like crawling into a corner,” she said.
She thinks she remembers a saying: “You know, when a tragedy happens, give up, give in or keep going,” she said.
She can’t remember the exact quote or who said it. “Maybe it’s a Cindy Michael saying,” she joked.
“We made the choice,” she added, “to keep going.”
Michael and MacPherson went into the burned-out house a week after the boys and their mother were found — Lena stabbed in the living room and Mason and Christian, who perished in the fire, upstairs in their beds.
She had given Mason a Spiderman bookbag, and she found it in the house.
“And he never got to use it,” she said.
The idea for the memorial fund, and the bookbag giveaway, became their way to turn the lives cut short into a legacy.
Last year, the fund gave away 450 bookbags at the August event.
The spaghetti dinner, next Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. at the Eagles Hall on Wilson Avenue, raises money for the fund, which in turn helps children in the community.
The money has to benefit children in some way, whether it’s given to an organization or a family in need of help.
“When you’re in a predicament, we get the call,” she said. “One hundred percent of what comes from the spaghetti dinner goes into an account at Chase Bank, and we help whoever needs it.”
Police never found who murdered Lena and left her sons to die in the fire, which was presumably set to cover up the killing.
Michael, who lived in Warren at the time, had kept the boys for a visit for four days.
“She picked them up Sept. 12, and by 6 the next morning, they were dead,” she said.
Lena and Joe had talked until 1 a.m. on the phone, she said. “And it happened after that. She never said she was afraid of anything, and five hours later, she was dead.”
“I felt like whoever did this knew those boys were there and treated them like their lives weren’t worth anything,” she continued.
“But they were worth the world to us. ... They had such a short time on this earth.”