Overflow funeral crowd bids a final goodbye to slain Colorado Springs teenager
The people wore blue. The flowers were blue. Even the coffin shone periwinkle blue.
Blue, after all, was Derek Greer’s favorite color.
The 15-year-old Derek was a favorite too, judging from the sobbing teenagers who crowded into Angelus Chapel for his funeral Saturday.
He was found slain March 12 on a rural road. Five people have been arrested in his killing and that of friend and fellow Coronado High School student Natalie Partida, 16.
But no one at the funeral was thinking about killers. They were sharing anecdotes about the boy they knew and loved, bidding the bespectacled Derek goodbye one last time.
The chapel sits 216. Not enough. Funeral directors had to crack open about 20 folding chairs to accommodate the overflow.
Derek’s friends held one another, crumpled tissues in hand, as they shared their sorrow before the funeral.
Then the stories began.
Derek making his mother stop the car so he could give his Valentine’s Day gift to a little girl strolling the sidewalk with her mother.
Derek piling into a van with teens from his West Side church group to enjoy a day at the North Pole.
And baby Derek, with his “chubby cheeks,” bringing unprecedented love into the heart of his mother, Heather Ferguson.
“Derek, you gave me the best 15 years of my life,” she told him in tears, leaning against his coffin.
With his mother, father, stepfather and six siblings, Derek had an intertwined family that shared much love and many good times, said a weeping woman who knew them all.
Derek’s funeral program contained a poem signed “Love, Derek.”
“Think of me as living in the hearts of those I’ve touched,” it read. “For nothing loved is ever lost, and I was loved so much.”
Derek Benjamin Greer
A judge Thursday ordered first-degree murder trials for three of the five people accused of executing two Coronado High School students earlier this year. (The Gazette, Christian Murdock)
(The Gazette, Christian Murdock)
Derek Benjamin Greer