Family, friends mourn woman, her 2 children

LOGAN — Alandra Guzman tugs on a handmade bracelet, her dark-brown eyes wet with tears.

"Abbey gave me this bracelet," she says. "She was my best friend."

Guzman's bracelet is made of a shoelace from Abbey's sneaker, its rainbow-colored beads a gift from Victor.

"Abbey and Victor left us with a lot of fun memories," said Guzman, 11. "We played soccer together, and they made us laugh."

Visiting from Wendover, Alandra was in Logan on Tuesday to pay final respects to her former classmates, Abbey and Victor Alanis, who were killed in a catastrophic mudslide July 11. Their mother, Jacqueline Leavey, also died in the slide — the result of a canal break that buried the family's rental home in a torrential mound of mud and debris.

Cleanup at the site and its surrounding neighborhood is still under way, and many questions about responsibility for the disaster remain unanswered.

For a moment, however, those things could wait.

"We are here today to walk with those we loved," said Father Clarence Sandoval, the victims' parish priest. "We place them in God's hands, and he will take care of us all. Let not your hearts be troubled."

Friends and relatives of Leavey and her children gathered somberly Tuesday afternoon to attend the funeral Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Hyde Park. Conducted primarily in Spanish, the service focused on hope and faith in Jesus Christ, finding personal peace and seeking answers.

"We did not know a month ago, my friends, that we would be here today, that something like this was going to happen," said Sandoval, translating a portion of his remarks for English speakers among the congregation. "But when we heard the story in the news, Jesus was carrying us. He was carrying all of us, especially the family, in a very special way.

"And we were united as a community by this tragedy. Those people who have helped us — the police, the firefighters, the city of Logan, the Red Cross — we didn't look at what color we were or what language we spoke. We were one family, one community, and we continue to pray for those we left behind," he said.

Laid to rest at the Logan City Cemetery, not much is known about the Alanis-Leavey family. The family has requested respect for its privacy, and limited information about Jacqueline and her children has been made public.