Items at a roadside memorial for murdered teens Derek Greer and Natalie Cano-Partida have been stolen, further shattering their family members’ hearts.

A memorial with two white wooden crosses, one for each teen, was erected on the side of Old Pueblo Road, where the bodies of Derek, 15, and Natalie, 16, were found. Friends and family soon covered the plot in flowers and lights, with ornamental guardian angels standing watch.

It was a place where people could come to grieve.

“When you have your child, your kid gets all this love poured into this child. And then when they’re taken from you, you still have your heart full of love to give,” said Heather Ferguson, Derek’s mother. “There’s nowhere for that to go. So I try to take that and put that into the memorial.”

But when Ferguson visited the plot, she found it stripped of most of its mementos.

“There’s not even a word for it,” she said. “Probably sadness. I was heartbroken.”

Missing were solar lights along the pathway to the memorial, glass flowers and other sentimental trinkets the family had placed there, the mother said.

“It was all pretty expensive. We’re a struggling family, so it was pretty upsetting when I went out there to see it all gone.”

With workdays and mortgage payments missed, she said, the family home was lost three months after Derek’s murder. They temporarily lived in a hotel and now are staying with friends.

Ferguson said packing up her son’s bedroom was the most painful.

“He had his fingerprints on the window from when he would open it up. When we left, I had to clean the windows and wipe away his fingerprints, knowing he would never leave another fingerprint.

“I don’t have his room anymore, so I go to the memorial,” she said.

Derek and Natalie were murdered execution-style in March 2017 alongside Old Pueblo Road in Fountain. Natalie first was handed a cellphone and told she could say goodbye to her family via Facebook, according to an arrest affidavit. When she didn’t log on, one of her killers told her she had lost her chance.

After the Coronado High School students’ bodies were found, 10 people were arrested. Nine pleaded guilty. Diego Chacon was sentenced to 65 years in prison, and Marco Garcia-Bravo is scheduled to stand trial this summer.

Alexandra Romero, who was arrested for kidnapping and accessory, told police that Derek was killed only because he was with Natalie that night.

Ferguson created a GoFundMe page for re-decorating the memorial. It can be found here.

The names Natalie and Derek are carved into two crosses at the scene of a double murder on Old Pueblo Road. About 70 solar lights light up the location where Coronado High School students Natalie Partida and Derek Greer were shot execution style on March 11, 2017. The photo was taken in March 2018.

JERILEE BENNETT, THE GAZETTE