Man Wins Fight to Keep Desert Memorial to Son

CATHEDRAL CITY — A disputed angel will be allowed to remain in the desert, its steel wings reflecting the sun and its face reflecting the love of a father for his dead son.

Federal officials had threatened to dismantle the 6-foot-tall statue built in memory of Jeremy Shondrick, a 10-year-old crushed when an earthen wall gave way as he played with friends in a wash near the Colorado River in 1994.

But under a compromise reached this month, the memorial can remain.

Though the boy is buried in this Riverside County town, his father, William Shondrick, said the memorial in eastern San Bernardino County is the place that most represents his son’s spirit.

“I’ve got Christmas presents to take up there,” Shondrick said. “I can’t leave him out.”

Shondrick built the memorial--with a profile of his son’s face inside the halo--on a hill overlooking the distant Colorado River. But he unknowingly placed it just inside a 77,520-acre area that was being considered for federal wilderness protection.

Six months after Shondrick built the angel, President Clinton signed the 1994 Desert Protection Act and the area become the Whipple Mountain Wilderness Area.

Shondrick, 43, said he chose the remote site after he was given informal permission by a federal ranger.

But officials, concerned that memorial visitors would disturb the wilderness area, told him he would have to move the angel or it would be dismantled.

Shondrick did not relent, and a compromise finally was reached during a meeting between Shondrick and U.S. Bureau of Land Management officials at the site.

Shondrick agreed to remove a picnic table and a barbecue that he had set up near the statue. The bureau, in turn, will block a dirt road leading to the memorial, meaning visitors now will have to hike a quarter-mile. The bureau plans to dedicate a plaque to the boy and to name the trail “the Jeremy Shondrick Trail.”