Rickey Hargrave said he saw the same two women standing at the morgue every time a body was brought in by ambulance.
“They would stand until somebody mentioned something — a name, an ID. And if it was not their loved one, they would disappear.”
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Hargrave, a chaplain from Texas, was stationed at the morgue in New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and on the second day of watching these two women, he walked over to them and asked who they were looking for.
It was their son and brother, George Cain.
“George was supposed to come off shift that morning (of the 9/11 attacks), but he stayed. He went in,” Hargrave said.
A mother’s pain
Cain’s mother told Hargrave she’d like to tell him about George, and he said please do.
“For the next 30 minutes, I sat there and listened as she, as a mother, would tell me about her son,” he said. “She said, ‘I’m hoping that we’ll find his body.’ … She then said something that I — I never can get over. She said, ‘Chaplain, you’re the first one to ask me and listen to my talking about George.’”
That was Hargrave’s role — to ask and listen. He did that too with Bobby Rice, a police officer assigned to take care of the chaplains.
“One day as I was walking in, he said, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘I’m one of the chaplains from Texas.’ He said, ‘Oh, blah blah blah another chaplain, another God.’ I said, ‘Nope, I’m just a representative, Bobby, and that’s all I’m going to be.’”
The two struck up a friendship after that.
“Not only did I and the other chaplains pray for him constantly, we were constantly with him,” Hargrave said. “When it was my turn to leave — because we have to rotate in and out of those things — there were two other chaplains that came in.”
Last tour
Those two carried on the conversations, and one of them — Gary Malcus — would walk and talk with him after his assignment was done each day. “On my last tour, when I went back in December, Bobby and Gary had talked to the point where Bobby was ready to change his life. Gary had to leave and catch a plane. He told Bobby, he said, ‘You go find Ricky. He’s coming in. And when you find Ricky, he knows where to go.’”
As soon as Hargrave arrived, Rice asked him to come with him to a room where they could sit down and talk.
“He said, ‘I’ve got to be saved. … Gary Malcus told me that you knew how to do that.’ I said, ‘I can’t save you, but Jesus can.’”
Hargrave explained the gospel to Rice, and he decided to follow Jesus.
“Not only was Bobby saved and baptized, his wife and his son — and I’ve got a picture of them in the baptismal waters out in a river,” Hargrave said.
