When officer Jason Sprague was killed on the job four years ago, Arkansas police Cpl. Shawna Yonts knew she wanted to make something his family could remember him by.
So she made a memory quilt.
Sprague, a Texarkana, Texas, police officer, worked across the hall from Yonts, an Arkansas-side officer, in the Bi-State Justice Center in Texarkana. The building sits on the Texas-Arkansas state line at 100 N. State Line Ave.
Yonts didn’t know Sprague well when he was alive, she said, but she was a crime scene detective at the time of his death June 15, 2013. She helped the Texas-side investigators with the crime scene after he suffered fatal injuries in a hit-and-run crash in Grady T. Wallace Park that night.
She met his wife, Stephanie Sprague-West, and his then-4-year-old son, Caden, at his funeral.
“As soon as I went to the funeral I wanted to do that for Stephanie,” Yonts said of making the T-shirt quilt.
Yonts told Sprague-West that if she gathered the materials, Yonts would make the quilt. That was in 2013.
Officers from the Texarkana, Texas, police department presented the quilt to now-8-year-old Caden in a ceremony Thursday afternoon at the Bi-State Justice Center. Yonts couldn’t make it to the ceremony, so Texas-side Sgt. Chris Phelps, who was also on duty the night of Sprague’s death, helped present the quilt.
Yonts said she was glad that Phelps took care of the ceremony.
“I probably would have been bawling,” she said.
Yonts, who has been constructing memory quilts since 2002 and has made more than 20 quilts, said this one was a challenge to create.
“It was more personal because I had worked his death and because I was a law enforcement officer,” she said. “It was difficult to even pull out the stuff.”
After Sprague’s wife remarried and became Stephanie Sprague-West, Yonts said, it became easier to pursue the project because she saw that Sprague-West was happy. She also found a design for the center of the quilt that inspired her to work on it — a police officer with a badge, which she made from fabric and T-shirt scraps.
The quilt, which took around 40 hours to make, isn't just made of T-shirts: It includes material from 12 of Sprague’s T-shirts, his LifeNet jacket, a pair of battle dress uniform pants, his son’s baby blanket, a tie and a fluorescent yellow traffic vest with reflective stripes.
Yonts said the vest was “not normally something” she would have put in the quilt, but Sprague’s wife asked for it to be included, so she made it work. Sprague’s wife picked out most of the materials for the quilt.
“She went and attached little notes to things she picked out and why she picked them out,” Yonts said.
Fabric from Sprague’s regular uniform is not in the quilt. He was wearing it the night he died, Yonts said.
The quilt is now home with Sprague’s family. Although Yonts has her own quilt-making business, Arrested Designs, this project was a volunteer effort.
“She wanted to pay me money for it, but there was no way I was going to take money for something like that,” Yonts said.
Yonts said she’s glad the project is finished.
“It’s a weight off my shoulders,” she said.
