Visitors to Everett’s Bayside Park and P-Patch can still see summer’s bounty. Some crops have yet to be harvested, but on a misty day the place looks like fall. A hay bale offers a spot to sit and savor the Port Gardner view.
That hay bale isn’t supposed to be there. It’s a substitute for a cast concrete garden bench installed in 2014. That beautiful bench — with a curved seat and dragonfly and cattail embellishments — has been stolen.
It wasn’t just any park bench, nor was it paid for by the city. Two garden benches were placed at Bayside Park in remembrance of Jenny McCollum and Michael Seavy, who were killed in a 2003 car crash caused by a drunken driver.
The missing bench is the one installed in honor of McCollum, a 52-year-old Everett antique store owner.
“We are devastated, and are not sure why or how anyone could do this,” said Connie Becerra, whose husband, Kevin McCollum, 37, is Jenny McCollum’s son. They hope anyone with knowledge of what happened to the bench will contact them.
“Now there’s a hay bale there. Kevin went and bought one,” Becerra said. “He’s not in a hurry to replace the bench if somebody is going to do it again.”
Officer Aaron Snell, spokesman for the Everett Police Department, said Monday he has no information about the bench. In the past 30 days, there have been no police reports of incidents at the park overlooking the leveled site of the Kimberly-Clark mill.
The loss of the bench is a reminder of one of Everett’s darkest days.
Jenny McCollum was driving home from her Everett shop Feb. 23, 2003, when her minivan was struck by a Ford Mustang that sped through the intersection of Wetmore Avenue and 23rd Street. Seavy, 20, and 18-year-old Cory Baudry, passengers in the car, also were killed. The car’s driver and another young man were injured.
The driver, Grant Fosheim, was 20 when he was sentenced to six years in the vehicular homicide case. Since serving his time, Fosheim has spoken at safe-driving events and has met with Kevin McCollum.
When Becerra and her husband started a GoFundMe account to raise money for the benches, “Grant was the first one to donate,” Becerra said. The missing bench cost about $325, she said.
Mary Belshaw, the P-Patch coordinator, works nearly every day in the community garden. About 750 pounds of fresh produce grown there was donated to the food bank this season, she said. It was Oct. 5 when Belshaw noticed the bench near the park’s north entrance was gone.
“I was really sorry,” said Belshaw, whose, husband Bill Belshaw, helped create the P-Patch in 1993. “People use that bench. They sit and write. They draw. They contemplate. It means something to people.”
To Kevin McCollum, it meant a place of healing. “She loved to garden. And she loved Everett,” he said of his mother before the benches were unveiled on June 21, 2014.
That day, the Bayside Neighborhood Association and Everett Parks &Recreation hosted a grand reopening party at the refurbished park.
The benches, which weren’t bolted down, don’t have the names of Jenny McCollum or Seavy on them. A sentiment inscribed on a sculpture placed between them conveys a tranquil message: “Come and sit with me, Let us be in this moment together. We are all family here.”
Becerra and her husband are mystified by the theft. The bench is so heavy it took two people to place it in the park. “Most thieves will grab and go,” said Becerra, who with her husband has decorated the area with flowers and seasonal items.
“They have maintained the garden,” said Wendy McClure, coordinator of Everett’s Office of Neighborhoods. McClure said the northern part of the park is city owned, but part of it is still Kimberly-Clark property. “There’s an effort to bring it into city ownership,” she said.
McClure, who once tilled a P-Patch plot there, said the garden and its memorial area are special places. They create community. A brazen theft, she said, “flies in the face of that kind of community building.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.
How to help
Anyone with information about the bench missing from Everett’s Bayside Park is asked to email Connie Beccera or Kevin McCollum at: becerrac75@yahoo.com
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