Last modified: Sunday, September 17, 2006 12:13 AM EDT Tony and Lila Henriques with the sign he built for his church in Rehoboth as a memorial to his son, who died in a hunting accident five years ago. (Tom Maguire/The Sun Chronicle) Family's sign of healing BY GLORIA LaBOUNTY/SUN CHRONICLE STAFF REHOBOTH -- As Tony Henriques hammered away at stone outside Community Covenant Church last summer, he pounded away at his grief. `` At times, I cried,'' he said, and he still cries a lot. He was breaking up granite to build a structure, and when people stopped to ask if it would be a new sign for the church, he said it would be that and more. `` It's going to be an invitation,'' he said. `` I want people to get to know God's word.'' The sign, which will be dedicated at the church after special services this morning, is also a memorial to his son. With the help of others, Henriques built it to mark the place where he and his wife Lila found hope after the death of their 19-year-old son, Derek, in a hunting accident almost five years ago in Foster, R.I. What further deepens this father's pain is that he was the one who fired the fatal shot after mistakenly thinking that the movement in the brush was a deer. `` At times I thought I was going crazy,'' Henriques said of those weeks and months after his son's death. Then, he and his wife rediscovered their faith at Community Covenant, and found a way to turn their sorrow into solace for others. Henriques said he wants to let others know that this is where he was comforted when he needed it most. `` I want to help those in need who go through similar things in life,'' he said. `` I pray to God that other people don't have to go through what we went through to know Him.'' Henriques will tell his story today during the 9 and 10:45 a.m. services at the church, but by videotape because the telling is too emotional. He and his wife will be there, and will join with church members to pray around the sign and to dedicate a plaque in Derek's memory. `` It's going to be a monument in the community, one of those landmark signs,'' said Pastor Dennis Baril of Community Covenant. `` I hope what he says about it being an invitation is true for everyone who goes by, and that it will be a sign of hope for anyone who comes here.'' The tragedy at the root of today's dedication was widely played out in the news media following the December 2001 hunting accident. Soon after, the family was contacted by representatives of the Oprah Winfrey and Montel Williams TV talk shows to see if they would tell their story on air. The couple refused. The death of their son was not a show, they said. `` I don't want to bring it all back,'' Henriques said. `` It is very painful.'' He said he finds it fortunate in a way that the accident happened the way it did, because no one else was at fault. `` Who could I blame?'' he said. `` I did it.'' That reality added another dimension to his grief, and Lila said he and the whole family were such a mess that she had to find the strength to support them, even as she dealt with the kind of sorrow only a mother can know. `` I had to be strong for everyone else,'' she said. `` It was coming from somewhere, and I don't know where. Maybe it was God.'' Yet, she lost her faith for awhile as she questioned how God could allow such a tragedy. Then at the funeral, she lost faith in the Catholic Church after the priest who conducted the Mass did not talk about Derek during his homily, and instead focused on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which had happened just three months earlier. `` I didn't connect at all,'' Lila said. `` I did not feel the Mass was being said in memory of my son.'' Although she greatly sympathized with the Sept. 11 families, she said, `` this is my son. The day was not about 9/11.'' In the following weeks, the priest never called to ask how the family was doing, she said, and that made her feel disconnected from the church even more. Then one day while visiting her son's grave, she met a woman who had also lost a child, but who found hope through her faith and her church, the Assembly of God. So Lila and her husband, who live in Cumberland, R.I., attended services there for awhile, then heard about Community Covenant, an evangelical Christian church in Rehoboth, and tried it out. From the first day, they felt like they belonged. `` I found peace here,'' Lila said. She also found that Baril was talking about the same kinds of things she was going through in her everyday life. `` It was as though he was talking to me,'' she said. `` I felt connected. I felt peace. That was how I got back into my faith.'' Baril remembers how he got to know the family. When they first came to the church, he said, he did not know their story, but he saw how emotional Tony Henriques was. `` Then one day Tony came to me and said, `Do you know who I am? Remember the man who shot his son? I'm the man.' Then we cried together,'' Baril said. Henriques said he came with questions, like `` Where is my son? Is he OK?'' He had to know, and he now believes that Derek is in heaven, `` because God told me so.'' He ended up finding that Sundays were easier when he went to services, even though Mondays through Saturdays were difficult. Then one day, he approached Baril with an idea. He wanted to build a new sign for the church to replace the old wooden one, and he wanted to do it in memory of Derek. Baril gave his approval. Henriques, who works in the construction field, then remembered the offers of friends who said that if he ever wanted to do any kind of memorial, they would help. So he enlisted them, and got donations of money and materials, then spent weekends and days off working through the summer on the sign that ended up being 8 feet tall and 18 feet wide. He believes that God gave him the strength to get through it, the courage to be there, and the friends willing to help. `` That's when I got to experience God's grace,'' he said. `` That's when I started to understand things.'' He sees the sign as an invitation for people to get well through God, as he did. `` In the worst moments of life, when you most need a best friend to listen to you, to love you, to care for you, to show you kindness and patience, that's when God steps in,'' he said. God also stepped in unexpectedly three months after Derek's death, when the family was contacted by a young woman who said she had given birth to Derek's son a year earlier, a son whom Derek never knew existed. A DNA test confirmed that Derek was the father, and Tony and Lila later met their grandson, Nathan, who took to them immediately, and who now spends many weekends with them. He is now called Nathan Derek, and bears an obvious resemblance to his father. Sometimes, he calls Tony `` Daddy.'' `` I call him God's gift,'' Tony said, while his wife calls him `` a miracle baby.'' `` God could have made a miracle that day,'' Tony said of the day he lost his son. `` I could have missed.'' He sometimes wonders what would have happened if the accident had gone the other way, and he had been struck instead. But then he said, `` Derek would have gone through the pain and the grief I am going through.'' And what is grief, he asks? Then he answers. `` Grief is the price you pay for love.''