Funeral director uses casket and photos to warn kids: 'this could be you.'

Jet, March 7, 1994 by Dobie Holland

It is called a "mock funeral" and funeral director Paul Robinson conducts them for youths in Gary, IN, with a hard-hitting flair to stop their gang violence and self-destructive behavior which often leads to their deaths.

His message is clear: Join a gang and you could end up in a casket. Drink and drive and you could die. Abuse drugs and other substances and you could be my next customer.

He is a true messenger of death. On this day he delivers that message to an audience who should live to appreciate it - Gary, IN, youths, mostly ages 13 and 14. For it is the youth who can easily fall prey to urban violence and other ills of society.

So Robinson goes through the trouble of driving his hearst station wagon, loading it with a steel casket and graphic photos of Black people felled by violence and starts lecturing to school children in the area.

"This could be you," he tells the seventh and eighth grade classes of the Tolleston Middle School, the place he visits when he invited Jet along to witness his lecture. Robinson holds up a photo of a 21-year-old lifeless man with a golf-ball-sized bullet wound in back of his neck.

"This young man had returned from the Army to get his brother out of the gangs," he explains to the mortified Tolleston students. "Sometimes your loved ones can get hurt when you do things that aren't right. Death has no respect to age, economic background or color. But if you're in a gang, something like that can happen to you quicker," he added.

Robinson asks the children to write the name of someone they "know" (who does drugs, belongs to a gang, sells drugs or drinks and drives) on a piece of paper. At the end of his presentation, he asked the students to form a single line to the casket and drop the paper with the name written into it once they file by. As the students do this, he encourages them to look into the 12" X 12" square mirror lying inside the casket and he says: "THIS COULD BE YOU!"

He likes to call the experience a "mock funeral" and has even written a mock funeral program to drive the morbid message home - if you engage in a risky activity, you could wind up in the casket.

"Some of you will be the future leaders, but if you participate in drinking and driving (he holds up a photo of a man in a car, charred beyond recognition), you could end up here (in the casket)," Robinson warns.

Gary, which is 81 percent Black, had the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the country. The record 102 murders in 1993 is reflective of the inner-city cancer which has consumed the predominantly Black municipality.

The Northwest Indiana city, which has a population of more than 116,000, was once a thriving steel industry town but a poor economy has taken its toll.

Constantly forced to prepare "our future" for burial, Robinson decided to do something. Three years ago, he wrote a mock funeral program at a stop the violence function and it has grown into a compelling anti-violence and anti-drug message.

Robinson's Special Anti-Violence, Anti-Drug Message

"I felt I had to do something. If I were Stevie Wonder, I would have written a song about it, but I'm a mortician. I prepare these kids for death and I had to express it," explains Robinson, the father of two children, ages 9 and 6. "Anything I can do to keep them from being victimized, I'll do it."

On this day, it appears he got his message across.

"I think it's a positive message because some students don't understand the permanence of death," noted Richard Watkins, the administrator for gifted student programs at Tolleston. "One of the most important things was for them to see themselves in the mirror (of the casket) - that brings it home.

"I think more gang members need to hear it, because I don't think they know just how fast life can go," observed eighth-grader Michelle Williams, 13.

Roger Johnson, a 14-year-old eighth-grader, who wants to be an obstetrician when he grows up, added that Robinson's message is a strong deterrent.

"I don't want to be found decomposed in an abandoned building like the guy in the photo," Johnson said, referring to the photo Robinson showed of a decomposed body of some one who died of a drug overdose and was not discovered until weeks after his death.