THE SHORT LIFE OF MARY SUNSHINE

Mary Sunshine wasn't her real name but the nickname fit like her favorite blue jeans: the perpetual smile, the laugh that was bigger than she was, the cheerful way she went about living.

Her real name was Mary Elizabeth Katherine VanDyke. She was 26 and led an ordinary life with a husband, two sons, a job that didn't match the bills and a beat-up car she hated.

The end of this ordinary life was extraordinarily violent, the urban nightmare of the `90s suddenly in her face. Three bad teenagers and a stolen gun. She, alone at a corner pay phone. They wanted her car. She fought them, unaware that the one police say was 16-year-old Cassie Larron Holness was hiding a .38-caliber revolver. A bullet ripped through her head. The kids fled as she lay dying, car keys clutched in her hand, her house within sight down a quiet Lake Park street. Helen Wilson reads the newspaper. She watches TV news. She used to see stories about people who were murdered and she'd think it was a terrible thing, quickly forget and go on, business as usual. No longer. Mary VanDyke was her daughter, not a headline. She knows now how deep and wide are the wounds for the living when death comes so brutally and so randomly.

"Because there's so much violence, our hearts tend to get hardened and we forget that little Mary who stood on the street corner," Wilson says. "But what about that 3-year-old who clings to his grandmother because he's afraid the people he loves won't come back? Or the 9-year-old whose mother can't help him with his math or put her arms around him? We have a tendency to go on with our lives and forget that these people's lives are forever changed."

A Palm Beach County grand jury on Thursday indicted Holness, a Palm Beach Gardens High School student who lives in Lake Park with his grandmother, on first-degree murder charges and decided he should be tried as an adult.

A girl who dated Holness but who did not want to be identified says he told her that Cassie was short for Casanova. She said he sold drugs but did not use them. Cassie had been expelled from school for fighting, she said, and has a mean streak and a bad temper even though he looks rather innocent.

"He's really smart when he wants to be," she says. "Sometimes it's like he's too smart."

Mary VanDyke's mother says she has no sympathy for the person who killed her daughter.

TREASURING THE MEMORIES

"I'd like to say to Palm Beach County: Please remember her and don't let the perpetrator of this crime go free or spend time in jail to be turned loose in seven years because she won't be loose in seven years," Wilson says. "She won't ever be back. She doesn't have any tomorrows left. We have only yesterdays."

So she treasures the last Valentine card, the old photographs, the last phone call, the last `I love you.' She mines her memories for mental pictures and comes up with her 5-foot-2, tomboy teenager in high heels for the first time, walking like she had on cowboy boots; her fifth-grader starring in the school play, delighting in her role as a little old lady; her cooing, beautiful baby who was always happy and the envy of all the other mothers in Petaluma, Calif. "She was all about life and full of it," says Wilson.

When Mary was still a baby, the family, including a brother and a half brother, moved to Maryland and eventually to Winter Haven in central Florida. She was a cheerleader for the Auburndale Cowboys, a football team sponsored by the parks department, and a member of the track team at her junior high school. She grew up like one of the boys in the neighborhood, playing rough, wearing jeans and never acting like a sissy ol' girl. Friends were easy for Mary Sunshine. She always had lots of them. Her mother bought Mary her own phone line but it wasn't unusual to find her using both phones at the same time.

The family moved to Palm Beach County and Mary enrolled as a sophomore at Jupiter High School and took a part-time job as a cashier at the Winn-Dixie in Jupiter.

A COUNTRY MUSIC FAN

She was 15 when she met John Grega Jr., a senior at Twin Lakes High School. It was love and wouldn't wait: the bride was 16, the groom 18 on May 30, 1981. Some 18 months later, John Grega III was born and Mary never finished school. They lived in Stuart for two years while John worked for his father's electrical supply company and Mary worked as a teller at Florida National Bank. They had their problems. In 1986, they divorced. "We really got married too young," John says.

The next year she married Don VanDyke, a sheet metal worker from Lake Park, and took a new job with Tire Kingdom's distribution center and corporate offices in Riviera Beach.

Raleigh Ford took a lot of teasing from the guys at work. How, they asked time and again, could he get any work done when the prettiest woman in the building shared an office with him? Raleigh was her boss and her buddy. She invited him over to her mother's for Thanksgiving dinner and he helped Helen in the kitchen until Mary and Don came in hours late from The Woods, the spot off U.S. 441 where people four-wheel through the mud every Sunday.

Mary liked the country music Raleigh played on his office radio and even now when he flips to the Pirelli price sheet on his desk he sees her scribbled notation: "Garth No. 1." She was a huge Garth Brooks fan, wore cowhide boots, spoke with a redneck accent, loved her cowboy hat and even had a belt with her name chiseled on the back.

HAUNTED BY HER DEATH

Helen Wilson called Raleigh the night Mary was shot, and on his drive to work the next morning he hoped Helen's call was a bad dream and that Mary would be there like always. When he saw sad faces milling around the front of the building he knew it was true. All day when Mary's phone rang-- people in their tire stores around the state, people across the country at the tire companies they ordered from-- Raleigh had to find the words to tell them why Mary wasn't there.

"The violence of what happened is a bigger crusher than anything else," he says. "Everyone here was in a daze. I don't think anyone got any work done that day."

Leslie Jones fingers the gold half-heart and swears it'll never come off the chain around her neck. Mary was wearing the other half of the heart the night she was killed. They were best friends; the heart was tangible proof. So is the pink carnation each friend pulled from her casket spray after the funeral.

"She was a beautiful person," says Leslie, who worked across the hall from Mary.

"Inside and out," says Tammie Boylan, a friend who worked next door from Tire Kingdom's corporate offices and distribution center in Riviera Beach.

Mary's death still haunts them: one is afraid of the dark, another is afraid of being alone. "I couldn't sleep at all Thursday night," says Cathy Hafner, another of Mary's friends at Tire Kingdom. "I heard every car that went by. Every noise."

"It makes you realize no one is untouchable," Tammie says.

NOT AFRAID OF ANYONE

Not even a spunky woman who, her friends say, was afraid of no one.

For a few months, before her second son, Marty, was born more than three years ago, Mary and Don took karate lessons. Her mother says she was not an expert and the color of her belt was barely above novice.

Her mother doubts Mary tried to take on the three teenagers with her karate moves but she was always a fighter, Helen Wilson says, remembering the time she decked her oldest brother. "She was not one to let you take anything from her, though she'd give you anything you wanted if she knew you needed it." Mary was older than her girlfriends and she advised them in matters of the heart: "Dump him," she'd say. "Ya gotta get strong." They always went out together on Tuesday and Sunday nights for free country dance lessons at Honky Tonks in West Palm Beach.

Earlier this winter, Mary lost control of her Hyundai and flipped the car with her friends inside. No one was hurt and everyone told them they were lucky to be alive. Don knocked some of the worst dents out and she continued to drive the car although every day she wished it could somehow turn into the four-wheel-drive pickup she dreamed of owning. They called her Crash VanDyke for weeks.

Don watched the kids when Mary was out and she wore a beeper so anyone could find her if they needed her. Her girlfriends saw Mary as someone trying to have some of the fun she missed when she took on responsibilities of motherhood and marriage so young.

They say Mary and Don had trouble paying all their bills and that their phone had been cut off sometime before the night Mary was shot when she went out to call someone who had beeped her.

`MANY LIVES WERE CHANGED'

Her brother John was at the house that night and heard the gunshot. He could see her car door was open. It looked like she was sitting there listening to music. Overcome by a bad feeling, he went for a gun and walked the short block to find his sister on the ground.

He won't talk publicly anymore about what happened. Their mother says he blames himself, thinks he should have gone with her to the phone, somehow protected her. Don VanDyke also has secluded himself, his mother, Nancy, says. Mary's ex-husband was called the night of the shooting and spent most of the night at the VanDyke house.

He went home to shower and returned so he would be there when his son John, 9, awoke that morning and had to be told what had happened while he was asleep. He stayed out of school a week, couldn't sleep for a couple of nights and is now living with his father and attending a new school.

Marty, 3, clings to his grandmother, VanDyke and other close family members as though he is afraid that they too will leave and not come home. Mommy is in heaven, Marty sometimes says. No she's not, she's at work, he'll occasionally say, leaving grandmother the hard job of helping him understand death and keeping his mother's memory alive.

"In one short moment many lives were changed-- some for the better, some for worse," Mary's mother says. "I don't know what the `better' things are but I'm an optimist and I must look for the good in everything that happens. Maybe it's the unity of the community. Maybe the community will finally do something about the crime.

"The `worse' part was that I lost my daughter and my grandchildren lost their mother and they'll never recover that. All the people's lives she touched, they'll never forget her. I hope that by passing through their lives she has made it better that way."

Tire Kingdom has created a trust fund for John Grega III and Marty VanDyke, Mary VanDyke's children. Donations can be made to Tire Kingdom, 2001 N. Congress Ave., Riviera Beach, Fla. 33404. Checks should be made payable to Mary VanDyke Children's Trust Fund.

' I want her life to have counted for something in some small way,' says Mary's mother, Helen Wilson.

Reprinted with permission.