It is a Saturday, so, as she has most Saturday afternoons for the past five months, Cleotha Howard has made the 18-mile drive from her home in Burnsville to the Crystal Lake Cemetery in north Minneapolis. Climbing out of a loaner Ford sedan (she dinged her minivan in a fender bender), Howard trudges through a fresh blanket of December snow. A heavyset, asthmatic woman, she looks older than her 38 years and seems tuckered out by the time she reaches the spot where her youngest son, Steven Lawrence Temple, is buried. The grave has yet to be sodded over. It is marked only by a wooden stake and a tattered red flag, fluttering in the wind. "I'd like to get him a nice headstone. I'd like to have his picture on it, I know that," Howard says, a hint of her native Arkansas in her voice. She pauses and squints in the blinding sunshine. "My son Marcus always tries to tell me, 'Mom, he's in a better place now,'" Howard sighs. "And I always say the same thing: 'Lord, a better place... More >>>