Uvalde School Shooting Victims Receive Custom Caskets

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 non-stop, 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, 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 on Sunday. In all, he prepared 19 caskets for Uvalde victims: 18 of the 19 children and one adult.

“It has been an extremely emotional roller coaster for me,” Ganem said during a phone interview. “I don’t even know if you can hear my voice. I haven’t hollered at all, but I’m losing my voice for whatever reason.”

About 11 years ago, Ganem traded building custom cars for the casket business. His son joined him in 2016. For both of them, this massive undertaking was similar to the one just five years ago, when a different shooter killed 26 churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Their work for those families also left them exhausted, but with the hope they’d taken on some of the burden of those burying a child.

If families don’t have a specific request, they try to get a sense of the person’s interests. They’ve molded standard-size caskets into the shape of ‘57 Chevys and transformed children’s size ones into Batmobiles in the past. The Ganems offered Uvalde residents their services free of charge, relieving parents of the typical $3,400 to $3,800 price tag.