'Whatever it takes': Why one man feels a calling to give free funerals to homicide victims

On a rainy, miserable day, Gregory Wilson sits beside his son, Allen's, casket, spending their last few minutes together.

One by one, mourners pour into King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church at 1620 Anderson St. and past the coffin to pay their respects. Allen Wilson, 13, died from a gunshot wound while in his home in Louisville's Park Hill neighborhood over the Fourth of July weekend, another victim of senseless gun violence in Louisville. 

"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want, he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters," Rev. Keith Brooks reads aloud from Psalm 23. "Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

From the back of the predominately Black church on Louisville's West End, a solemn-looking man keeps an eye on the proceedings.

Anthony Oxendine, 44, is the owner of Spring Valley Funeral Homes. A country boy from the hollows of eastern Kentucky, Oxendinehas taken on the grim task of burying manyof the city's victims of gun violence, estimating he performed at least 100 of those funerals last year.

As of mid-August, the city's homicide rate has reached 106. It’s easy to grow cold to the number of shooting deaths flashed on a television screen until you are in the presence of a mother wailing over her lost child.

"To see a mother grieve that hard, it doesn’t seem natural, it doesn’t seem real. It seems like someone has that mother's heart and stomped on it," Oxendinetold The Courier Journal.

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While the number of shooting deaths has slowed slightly this year, during the week of June 27 to July 4, the week Allen Wilson was killed, there were eight gun-related homicides in the area. 

"Last year we had days when we had two funerals over gun violence, sometimes three or four a day," Oxendine said. "We are the only funeral home that will help people in a time of need whether they have money or not."

Oxendine runs two locations of Spring Valley Funeral Homes, one at 1217 East Spring St., in New Albany and at 719 East Chestnut St., in Louisville.

Funeral costs are exorbitantly expensive and can run anywhere from $800 for a cremation to $4,500 for a traditional funeral service. That can be a major hurdle for low-income families who are suddenly burdened with the high cost of an unexpected funeral.

Oxendine wanted these families to be able to say goodbye to their loved ones with dignity.

It's for that reason "we don’t require any money upfront to start the services," he said. "We will do what we have to, to make it work, whatever it takes for that family to have a service that they want."

"We are going to make sure it happens, one way or another," he added.

He admits that he often doesn't get paid for his services. “I have instances almost every day where people don’t pay, but that's okay because we’ll get someone else that will pay."

'I think God wants us to buy this funeral home'

Helping others in their time of need is something deeply ingrained in Oxendine. Born in poverty in eastern Kentucky, at age 5, he became the door greeter at Creech’s Funeral home,now Cawood Funeral Home, in Middlesboro, Kentucky.

“Clyde Creech gave me the opportunity to learn the funeral profession. He encouraged me daily and I fell in love with it because I saw how he helped families in their time of need," he recalls.

And he took that role seriously.

"My grandmother bought me this little blue suit and penny loafers from Sears-Roebuck. She put it on credit and made payments. That's all we could afford and that's what she did for me. I got paid $5 per night," Oxendine said. "We were able to go to a restaurant and get a sandwich after I got off work."

A way to make money as a child grew into a lifelong profession for Oxendine.

“About 10 years ago, my wife and I were living in Nashville. We had been there for only four months. She had a vice president’s job at a group of hospitals when I found this little funeral home in New Albany for sale. It was not doing very well, the gentleman was struggling to make it month to month," he said. "It was only doing 60 funerals a year and I felt like that was a calling that this community needed."

“I told her, 'I think God wants us to buy this funeral home. It's going bankrupt.'"

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So, the couple bought it. Laterhe leased the former R.G. Vance Funeral Home building inLouisville as well, one of the oldest mortuaries in the city. He then met with Christopher 2X, executive director of Game Changers and a longtime advocate for social and racial justice.

"I told him, 'these shooting victims that don't have no money, I’ll take care of it, I’ll help them,'" he recalls.

Oxendine said 2X was doubtful, telling the funeral director he'd heard that many times before.

"We've been to every local funeral home in this city and asked them for help and no one's willing to," Oxendine recalls 2X said. "They all want the money upfront."

But Oxendine, who recently ran for mayor, was different. He's stayed true to that promise of help.

"There’s always been a void in dealing with indigent challenges related to fatal homicides. Many times kids under the age of 18 that were fatally lost, their families didn't have insurance on the child or the means to raise money for a decent funeral service," 2X said. "Anthony has stepped in and told me, 'you tell the family we'll take care of it.'"

It's a sentiment 2X still can't believe is true.

"I haven't seen anything like him, and I’ve been around. He's filled that void. He and his wife, Darlene, have sacrificed their own profit, to help the indigent. I've seen their outreach to survivors too, doing extra stuff that I've never seen before, like getting groceries for the family and cards for the kids on the holidays," he added.

'We didn't know how we were going to get through this'

The Rev. Charles Elliott,a leading figure in Louisville's religious community, saidOxendine has been "very cooperative with us and families that have lost loved ones due to the violence. It has been his funeral home that has worked with us during these conditions."

Elliott recalls working with Oxendine to help 11-year-old Damani Willis who was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting while visiting his father in Detroit. On his return to Louisville, Willis was so traumatized by the shooting that he wouldn't leave his home. Oxendine and Elliott delivered groceries and helped with the rent while Disney princess Tiana and superhero Spider-Man paid a visit to help the young boy cope with the trauma of gun violence.

For mothers likeMisti Kidwell, herself a gunshot victim, Oxendine has been a Godsend in her time of anguish.

When her son Desijuan Berry, 20, was shot and killed at a Fourth of July event in New Albany, Oxendine, as he often does, waved the funeral expenses for the grieving family.

"What Anthony is doing means everything to me, especially since I'm out of work due to my own injury. I wouldn't have been able to handle the funeral costs without him," she said.

Her sister, Wanda Greene, added, "we didn't know how we were going to get through this. We have a GoFundMe account, but we've only raised $600. It wasn't going to come close to the money that we needed for the funeral."

When Jose Munoz was shot and killed at a local Olive Garden restaurant a few years ago, his family was unable to fly his body back to Mexico for internment. Oxendine arranged to have Munoz's body driven to the Mexican border at no charge to the family.

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Breathing life back into a community

What is often seen as a blessing to grieving parents is the genuine compassion Oxendine has for his community.

“My philosophy is to not only bury the dead but to breathe life back into the community by being there for the people afterward," he said. "I wish I had enough money to take care of all the funerals."

And his commitment to helping the community doesn't begin and end with funerals. 

"It's amazing how many people call me a day asking, 'can you help our family with food?'" he said. "This is America. Why should you have to call me for food? You shouldn’t. We should have jobs for these people."

To that end, he's started a program, “where we pick up the homeless and pay them to cut the grass in cemeteries and places where it's needed. I have a radio show Sundays on WLLV and if the elderly call in and need their grass cut, we send a crew out at no charge. It's just something I do to give back to the community."

He hands out hundreds of pumpkins and turkeys on west Broadway each year during the holiday season, has taken groups of homeless men to Vincenzo’s for dinner, and helped fund work to restore the historically Black Greenwood Cemetery in west Louisville. 

“I know what it’s like to be homeless, I know what it’s like to not have food," Oxendine said. "I began to dabble in the restaurant business after I got out of college and I went broke in Bowling Green. I lost my home and everything I had. Everything was set out on the street and I lived in my car. Through the grace of God, I made it back and I’ve been very successful thanks to him."

He credits his calling to help the poor to his period of homelessness and his mentor, Clyde Creech.

“It all comes from how Mr. Creech treated my grandmother. We were so poor that when my grandfather passed away, he gave her a vault to go with the funeral. You would have thought that she won the lottery," he said. "I remember how that touched her heart and I always wanted to do that for other families. That's why I pursued this career. To touch their hearts in a time of need. That's what drives me."

Reach photographer Pat McDonogh at pmcdonogh@courier-journal.com.