Short Lives Of Slain Girls Recalled With Tears, Hugs

Theirs was a world barely forming. Their lives included watching Disney movies, listening to rhythm-and-blues music on the radio, and drawing pictures of flowers and the sunshine with crayons and fat red markers.

They danced everywhere they went - to 7-Eleven to buy hot dogs, to the food-and-drink line at local powwows, to the park. They were too old to play with baby dolls and too young to ride the bus alone.

Sammiejo White, 11, and Carmen Joy Cubias, 9 - they were two pretty little girls too young to die.

About 100 mourners gathered at Our Lady of Mount Virgin Church in Seattle's Rainier Valley yesterday afternoon to remember Sammiejo and Carmen in a memorial service marked by songs and traditional Native-American prayers. Sammiejo's father, Sam White, was a member of the Gros Ventre Tribe in North Dakota.

Their eulogies were short because the girls' lives were. Friends and family members passed around pictures of the girls during a dinner following the service and swapped stories of two best friends.

Relatives and friends clasped hands and hugged just long enough to wipe a few tears. The last time the family was together like this was the Fourth of July, 1996, just two days before the girls turned up missing.

"They didn't deserve to die like this," said Mercy Barayoga, a cousin of Sam White who last saw the girls, their faces beaming, at a powwow at the University of Washington a couple of months before their disappearance.

The skeletal remains of the two girls were found Feb. 10 in a field in east Bothell after a transient spotted a skull. Medical examiners said the girls died of homicidal violence. Beyond that, there is little information.

Police officials don't know just how or when they died, and that's what's hardest for the girls' large extended family.

"The unknowing was hardest," said Rondeena Favel, Sammiejo's grandmother. "Were they tortured? Were they treated right? There's no clues. No nothing."

Sammiejo and Carmen, who were half-sisters, were living with their mother, Margaret Delaney, in the Crest Motel on Aurora Avenue North, where they built their lives around making mud pies, playing dress-up, and cutting wide turns around the motel parking lot in stolen shopping carts.

The girls seemed to live a rootless existence, never staying in any one place long enough to go to school or make lasting friends. Sam White, and Carmen's father, Leonel Cubias, had a tough time keeping track of their daughters as their mother moved them from one cheap motel to the next. Sammiejo and Carmen had seven other siblings, most of whom also lived at the motel.

"They lived in the city where there were unsafe places, and sometimes, they walked in unsafe streets," said Jean Raymond, a Ballard High School teacher who spoke at the service. Sam White was one of Raymond's pupils more than two decades ago.

Sammiejo and Carmen's last address was room No. 16 at the Crest Motel, which they left on a hot July 6 night and disappeared into the noise and chaos of an area of Aurora Avenue that spins with prostitution and drug dealing.

They left the motel at around 10:30 p.m. to beg for food at a Taco Time down the street and try to bum cigarettes for their 16-year-old brother, and they never came back. Delaney had left the girls alone with their brother; relatives say it was not the only time.

"You're talking about children raising children," said Kathleen Austin, a family friend with whom Sammiejo regularly stayed and called "auntie." "They were little mommies. That was their role."

When Delaney returned to the motel, the girls were gone. Three hours passed before she phoned police.

There was not much police officers could do. They had seen the scenario so many times before - a couple of youths leave home without telling their parents, and most of the time, they've simply run away from home.

But not Sammiejo and Carmen, family members said. They would have called.

Sam White, who has been staying at Harborview Medical Center for complications associated with his diabetes, was released from the hospital so he could attend his daughter's service. He trembled as family members hugged him.

White was too distraught to talk about his daughter. Delaney also declined to comment.