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A small business in Georgia makes and delivers 21 custom handmade memorial benches to the families of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Sean Peacock started making butterfly memorial benches after his sister’s death in 2008 and now sells them on Etsy. In late May, he received an inquiry about his benches from a woman in Uvalde. She wanted to know if they could be customized for the loss of a child and asked if there was a discount for more than one.
Peacock went online and searched for the woman’s name and “Uvalde” and discovered the request was from a parent of one of the victims of the school shooting at Robb Elementary. He posted about the special request on his personal Facebook page and people started offering to chip in to pay for the bench. Peacock decided to do one better and started a GoFundMe to raise enough to make a custom bench for each of the families of the 21 victims. In less than 48 hours, he’d raised over $23-thousand.
He spoke to family members of each of the victims to learn more about them so he could make the benches specific to each of the 19 children and two teachers. Then he and his crew got to work creating the custom benches. This many benches would normally have taken his small company more than a year to produce, but they did it in six weeks. Peacock’s whole community of Eastman, Georgia, got in on the project too. When they were complete, the community gathered to pray over the benches and then Peacock and the pastor of his church drove them to Uvalde to hand deliver them to the victim’s families. Peacock hopes the benches will be a reminder to the people of Uvalde that there is still good in the world.
Source: Good Morning America