It’s been 13 months since Warren and Maureen D’Angelo’s eldest son died in an auto accident. They’ve had good and bad days, moments when they can enjoy life and others when their grief seems too much.
But last Tuesday, when they noticed that the memorial cross that marked the spot where Shaun D’Angelo died had disappeared, it made things even worse.
“Why would anyone disturb that?” Warren D’Angelo asked. “That’s what’s so mind-boggling.”
They called several city officials and even the lawn maintenance company for their community, but no one knew Shaun D’Angelo’s memorial marker was in a room in the Broward County Traffic Engineering Building on Commercial Boulevard.
County maintenance workers had loaded the memorial marker into a van and hauled it off last week.
County officials regularly remove memorials from roads they maintain.
Although the county-maintained zone does not extend north of Wiles Road on Coral Springs Drive, the county acted because it is the de facto traffic engineer for the city.
Officials were probably told about the cross, said Henk Koornstra, assistant director of the county’s Traffic Engineering Division.
“We are the traffic engineer for Coral Springs, per a city-county agreement, and as such, we can be involved in the removal of memorial markers,” he said.
But the D’Angelos think the county was wrong to get involved. They plan to retrieve their son’s memorial and plant it back.
“I’m putting it back,” Maureen D’Angelo said. “I would have expected them to notify us. Our son’s name is on the cross. They could have found us in a second.”
But Koornstra said the county usually relies on city officials to notify families when they remove a roadside memorial. “There’s normally no phone number on the memorial,” Koornstra said. “We don’t know who it belongs to.”
Last week, the D’Angelos, confused and angry, put up a poster asking anyone with information about the cross to call them. It wasn’t until Thursday that they learned where the memorial was.
Shaun D’Angelo, 18, died in a car accident on July 15, 1998, on Coral Springs Drive just north of Wiles Road. He was going about 61 mph around a curb on a road with a 40-mph speed limit when the car smashed into a light pole, then became wrapped around a tree.
About a month later, a friend of the D’Angelos built a humble white cross and placed it where Shaun D’Angelo died. City commissioners discussed regulating roadside memorials in March. But the city hasn’t taken any action.
Jeremy Milarsky can be reached at or 954-572-2020.
