Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral today of two young boys who were allegedly suffocated in a hotel room by their own mother, strapped into the family car and sent plunging into Edisto River in Orangeburg County, S.C.
Filing past two small open coffins today, members of the community paid their respects to 18-month-old Ja'van T. Duley and his 2-year-old brother, Devean, at St. Paul Baptist Church in Orangeburg, The State newspaper reported.
Inside their caskets, the boys were dressed in white tuxedos and held toy trucks, CNN reported.
Mary Ann Chastain, AP
Helen Duley places flowers on the caskets of her grandsons Devean Duley, 2, and Ja'van Duley, 18 months, after graveside services at their funeral Friday at St. Paul Baptist Church in Orangeburg, S.C.
According to police, Duley, an unemployed, single mother, confessed to smothering her children after getting into a fight with her own mother on Sunday. Initially, she is said to have told investigators that the boys had drowned in an accident, The Associated Press reported.
The bodies of the boys were discovered on Monday. Duley has been charged with two counts of murder.
"I'm asking people not to judge her for what she's done," Helen Duley, Shaquan's mother, told WLXT-TV, "but to understand that we all have problems, and we never know when things might get out of hand. That's why it's important not to keep things bottled up in you."
The alleged crime has marked similarities to the 1994 South Carolina murders of Michael and Alex Smith, ages 3 and 1, whose mother, Susan Smith, strapped them into the family car before sending it into John D. Long Lake in Union County.
"Not another one," David Smith, Susan Smith's ex-husband and the father of Alex and Michael, told ABC News after learning of the Orangeburg case. "Not another tragic story similar to mine."