Joshua Case leads ministry for today's holy innocents
When Joshua Case and parishioners at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal Church bury some of Atlanta’s youngest victims of violence, they often do so alone. In many cases, family members are absent from the child’s life, lack transportation to the cemetery, or are incarcerated. Sometimes the state forbids them to attend.
For this brief, solemn service, Case, associate rector at Holy Innocents’, and the others become the child’s “family in mourning.”
Since April Case has conducted 16 of these services, a small portion of the roughly 300 indigent burials each year paid for by the county. As he learned more about Georgia’s young victims, Case met Cliff Dawkins, the chaplain who oversees the county’s indigent burials. Case was stunned to learn that burials of children often were taking place with no family present and no witnesses other than Dawkins and cemetery staff.
