Michael Romano, Ken Rianna, Barry Sutcliffe, Jay Lawrence’s uncle, and Peter Lawrence, Jay’s brother, stand at the garden entrance.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

SMITHFIELD — As a mason tapped ornate bricks into place on a stone walkway in Deerfield Park on Friday, birds chirped in trees nearby and the faint calls of children in a nearby ball field floated in the warm, spring air, all of the sounds blending musically to provide an appropriate accompaniment to the creation of a memorial.

It is the Smithfield Youth Memorial, in the form of a Garden of Peace, a project of the Jay Lawrence Foundation and scheduled for completion next month. The foundation itself commemorates town resident Jay Lawrence, 21, a student at URI who died in a car accident in 2001. The Garden of Peace, however, will allow families of any of Smithfield’s youth who die of any cause to post a memory of their loved one.

Ken Rianna, a member of the foundation’s board, said that the organization for years has been raising money through an annual golf tournament for scholarships for seniors at Smithfield High School.

“Jay was a star hockey player,” Rianna said, “and we also bought new uniform jerseys in his name. And we helped out the bullying program” under the direction of another board member, Sen. John J. Tassoni Jr., D-Smithfield, North Smithfield. “We built up some capital, and we wanted to do a memorial,” Rianna said.

Tassoni said the memorial will be the first of its kind in Rhode Island.

“We’re trying to take some of the memorials off the roads,” Tassoni said, referring to the homemade crosses and collections of flowers that are sometimes emplaced at the scene of a fatal traffic accident, hardly a place to visit safely.

The board members considered doing something at the Smithfield Ice Rink, where Lawrence had spent a great deal of his time, but Lynn Lawrence, Jay’s mother, found an article describing how members of a community had gotten together and built a memorial to their youth, Rianna recalled.

The next step was to confer with Brian Van Gorden of B.P. Van Gorden Services, a landscaping concern.

“He and Louis Polseno put together a plan that has meaning to people who have lost children,” Rianna said. “John Tassoni put us on the agenda of the Town Council, and they awarded us 10,000 square feet in Deerfield Park, across from the Senior Center.”

Van Gorden, supervising the work on Friday, said visitors will reach a central area by walking along a stone pathway lined with uneven pillars.

“The different heights are to symbolize the ups and downs of dealing with their loss,” he said.

Barry Sutcliffe, another board member, pointed to a raised area in the center of the stone circle at the end of the path.

“A broken heart goes there,” he said, gesturing.

The heart, a massive carved stone, lay to one side. “Brian broke it cleanly this morning,” Sutcliffe said.

Rianna said the heart “signifies the hearts of the people left behind.”

Those memorialized must have been town residents and must have been no older than 30 when they died, Rianna said.

tmorgan@projo.com