Scholarship keeps slain daughter on people’s minds
Like the voice of her daughter, Sara, the conversation is rarely far from Elaine Cavagnaro's thoughts even after nearly 17 years.
In 1993, Sara Halsey was a young woman with big plans and dreams. When you're smart and pretty and 20, life seems sun-lit and filled with endless possibilities. Like her engineer father, Sara excelled at math. She took college classes and shared good times with her girlfriends. She was going places.
Months after sister Leigh lost a fiancé to cancer, Sara surprised her mom by pausing to reflect on her own mortality. Her views were clearly defined, Elaine recalls. She wanted to be cremated. No room full of flowers. She'd rather the money be spent for something that would help others -- something to remember her by.
"A 20-year-old person normally doesn't tell you about death or think about death," her mother tells me in a soft voice that delicately unwraps the painful memory. "They don't have to. But here was our 20-year-old daughter saying, 'This is what I would want.' Sara said, 'Well, I don't want flowers. I want the money to go to something to help other people.'"
Her mother's memory of that conversation came rushing back a few weeks later on the awful night of May 21, 1993, when Sara was killed outside the Shark Club at 75 E. Harmon Ave. The female suspect in a 1980s Pontiac TransAm asked for a light for a cigarette. When Sara complied, the woman attempted to steal her purse. After a brief struggle, Sara suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the chest. The crime remains in Metro Homicide's Cold Case Detail files.
Elaine continues to work to ensure Sara's memory remains alive while still dealing with the loss.
"You learn how to tell everyone what they want to hear," she says. "It is devastating, but you don't really tell people how it affects you. There's no way to explain it. In time, you realize you can never go back to that person you were before it happened."
The pain is unbearable, but the broken heart still beats. So the grieving mother has done her best to keep going, in part because of that fateful conversation.
"We told people, 'Please, don't send flowers,'" Elaine says. "We set that up the day after she died while we were still in a shocked state. We were all stunned, but it was just so automatic because we had talked about it so soon before."
For years now Elaine and her husband, Bill Cavagnaro, have nurtured a scholarship in Sara's name at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. (Today, the Cavagnaros will take part in a used-book sale at 3009 Santa Margarita St. with partial proceeds benefiting the scholarship fund.) They also kindle a flickering hope Sara's killer will one day be caught.
"Parents shouldn't have to go through this," Elaine says, anger mixing with sadness in her voice. "We're not supposed to outlive our children. There's always going to be a void with that. In the beginning, they tell you, 'Oh, you'll get closure.'
"We don't want there to be closure. We don't want to stop thinking about Sara. She was part of our lives. She'll always be our daughter, our sister, our loved one."
In the end, the mother returns to the conversation she had with her daughter, who this year would have turned 37. She knows Sara would want the scholarship to go on.
"The big fear you have is, 'Is your child going to be forgotten?'" Elaine Cavagnaro says. "That scholarship gives us a consolation prize. At least we know other people are saying her name."
(To contribute: Sara Lynne Halsey Endowment Fund c/o UNLV Foundation, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, 89154)
John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
