GRUNDY, Va. — A town in mourning turned out Tuesday night to pay their respects to Ethan Stacy.
"It's a hard time. We loved little Ethan," said Marshall Osborne, a longtime friend of Ethan's father, Joe Stacy, and one of the pallbearers for Ethan's funeral.
A funeral service will be held this afternoon for Ethan, followed by a procession from the funeral home in Grundy, Va., to the Clinch Valley Memorial Cemetery in Richlands, Va., about 30 miles away.
Stacy was a man who looked in deep despair Tuesday over the tragic loss of his son. As he recalled fond memories of Ethan while wiping back tears, he also called for justice to be served.
"They need to pay for taking my son away," he said.
A church service was held Tuesday night for 4-year-old Ethan on the eve of his funeral. While hardly anyone in Utah knew Ethan in life, he has touched the lives of people in Utah and across the nation following his brutal death, allegedly at the hands of his mother, Stephanie Sloop, and her newlywed husband, Nathan Sloop.
The Sloops remained in the Davis County Jail on Tuesday, pending possible aggravated murder charges.
Stacy, who has been in constant contact with both Davis County prosecutors and victim advocates in Utah, said if they can file aggravated murder charges, he expects they will seek the death penalty against his ex-wife and her husband.
He said he is OK with prosecutors needing additional time before filing official charges.
"I don't want any mistakes made at all. Nothing. I don't want them coming out of this in any type of way," he said.
The focus Tuesday, however, was on Ethan and not the couple accused in his death.
Stacy recalled how his son was a quick learner.
"I could show him how to do something, he'd pick it up just like that," he told the Deseret News Tuesday. "He's just a very intelligent boy."
Stacy recalled how his son was "a great boy," how he loved to go to the playground and how most recently he had developed a strong liking for PlayStation video games.
"He'd stay glued to it all day if I let him," Stacy said.
The father fought back tears and sometimes just let them flow as he recalled happy moments with his son. He recounted these stories while standing in the Grundy Funeral Home's chapel. As he spoke of Ethan's short life, just 20 yards behind him rested a small, dark gray coffin surrounded by flowers and teddy bears.
Ethan Jonathan David Stacy's obituary listed May 11 as his day of death. That was the day Layton police and the Weber County Sheriff's Office found his body buried in a remote area near Powder Mountain.
Ethan had been in Utah only a few days after he was sent to live with his mother for the summer per a court order. Stephanie Sloop originally told police that Ethan had walked away in the middle of the night.
But investigators said the Sloops' stories began to contradict each other the longer the search went on. Eventually, the Sloops were arrested after allegations arose that Nathan Sloop had beaten Ethan, and neither the stepfather nor Stephanie Sloop took him to a doctor. The couple allegedly locked him in a bedroom while they got married because they were afraid of showing his bruised and swollen face in public.
After Ethan died, police say the Sloops tried to disfigure the boy so police would not be able to identify him.
"Ethan didn't want to go (to Utah). He wasn't looking forward to going to Utah whatsoever," Osborne said.
The last time Osborne saw Ethan was the Saturday before he went to Florida, where a court ordered Ethan to go to Utah for the summer to be with his mother. A picture of Ethan in an apple tree that appears on the Grundy Funeral Home website was taken that day in Osborne's yard.
On Tuesday, Joe Stacy, 35, with fiancée Becky Elswick by his side, said he had been online and seen the tributes and photos of the two vigils held in Utah and of the hundreds of people who had showed up for them.
"It's a wonderful feeling," he said. "There's so many good people out there."
Many of the flower bouquets and teddy bears surrounding Ethan's coffin were donated by people from Salt Lake City. A card on one bouquet read, "From a concerned stranger that saw you on TV."
Another was from the Buchanan County (Virginia) Sheriff's Office that simply said, "Praying for you." Still another card had the words, "Safe in the arms of Jesus."
The small town of Grundy is tucked in a hollow of the Cumberland Plateau in the lush green Appalachian Mountains. The directors of the funeral home said Ethan has touched people in a way they've never seen in their town.
The Grundy Funeral Home's website normally receives 3,000 hits a month. In the past four days alone, it has received 7,000 hits. More than 450 e-mail messages were sent to the website for Ethan, said funeral home vice president Curtis Mullins Sr.
For Joe Stacy, a tall, fit man who has served in the military and grew up in the Grundy/Richlands area of Virginia where he currently lives, part of him is feeling indescribable grief over Ethan's tragic loss, while another part of him still questions why it happened at all.
"I can't even imagine why a mother would stand by and let someone do that to her child," he said. "I would have found some way to stop him. Do something. Don't just stand there and watch. There had to have been something she could have done.
"There's just no excuse for it. None whatsoever."
At Tuesday night's church service, blue and yellow ribbons were handed out to raise awareness about child abuse.
"Tell anyone who asks what it's for, Ethan's story, so that we never forget," a note next to the ribbons said.
During the church service Tuesday night, among the prayers, the songs and a film with pictures of Ethan, Evangelist Mike Rife of the Church of Christ talked about how sometimes children can get on the nerves of adults, even in church. But the greatest gifts in God's kingdom were children, Rife said.
"I think events like this gets our priorities back in order," he said.
Rife said he believes God decided it was time for him to touch Ethan and give him a blessing.
"I believe God was there and said, 'I wish you were my boy,' and he is," he said.
During a short film that preceded the service, sobs could be heard throughout the small chapel with every picture of Ethan that was shown, from his hours right after birth to just a short time before he died. There were laughs when pictures of Ethan in his Halloween costume or of one with Ethan's head poking out of a cardboard box, something Rife noted in his comments.
"In situations like this, we have to have a balance," he said.
During his closing prayer, Rife talked about the broken hearts of the community and the nation.
"You know how our hearts are in a million pieces. You can't put all of our parts together, but you have all the pieces," he prayed.
e-mail: preavy@desnews.com