GALVESTON -- Late Tuesday night, Kenny Stewart e-mailed 11 News three photos. He wasn’t looking to be praised or recognized for the quality of the Galveston sunset he captured. He just wanted to find out how to get his pictures to Ohio.

He co-owns 14-acres of an island in Galveston’s West Bay. He and his partners labored the last several years building a fish camp there. A two-room house high on stilts above the Galveston tide, built with lumber they carried piece by piece on nothing larger than a 20-foot boat. They’ve always called it Staggers Island, named after the way barges and tugs stagger and stack up before they move through the Intracoastal Waterway.

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Then a few months ago, Kenny looked out the kitchen window, enjoying the eastward view with a pair of binoculars.

“I kind of looked down and said, 'Oh my gosh,' it was our island.”

Their island is Baby’s Grace’s island, the same small spit of land where a fisherman found the little girl in a plastic box back in October. Through those binoculars, Kenny was staring at the cross several hundred yards away that mourners had placed in Riley Ann Sawyers’ memory.

“It just broke my heart," he said.

But he wasn’t mourning for his island. He is a father and grandfather. He was mourning for his sudden connection to a murdered little girl.

"I just feel like she's a part of us out here. Just a part of our lives now," he said.

Then this past month, he heard about a petition being circulated to rename the island after Riley Ann Sawyers, a tedious process of legal mechanisms and red tape. To that problem, he and the other men who co-own that island had a simple response.

“If we own the island, we can name it whatever we want," he said.

So, the man who helped build an entire house on a remote outpost in the middle of the Intracoastal Waterway went to work in his Alvin garage.

He labored over an intricate four-foot sign, attached it to treated timber posts and placed it, permanently, in the northwest corner of their camp with a small metal cross on top.

Surrounded by a ring of rocks, a bed of seashells and, come the Spring it will be ringed by Confederate roses. The sign reads in bold wooden letters:  “Riley’s Island.”

The Galveston County Daily News

Riley Ann Sawyers

“There's gonna be a sign there as long as we're here,” said Kirk Johnson, who is also a co-owner of this section of the island. “And we'll always remember her."

The sign is in plain view of each and every tug, barge, and boat that passes the northern shore of this small spit of land. Next they want to cut a path from their camp and her sign southeast through the Texas tidal scrub to the cross that also bears her name.

They want to plant roses there too.

All this might not make the name change official as far as that red tape and those legal mechanisms go. But as far as a group of men who often gather on this island are concerned this is now Riley’s Island. It belongs to her memory.

So earlier this week Kenny Stewart took photos of Riley’s sign with the glow of a Galveston sunset in the distance. Those are the pictures he wanted us to help him deliver to Riley’s family in Ohio.

We did, along with this story. 

A picture might paint a thousand words. 

A simple gesture from a few Galveston fishermen speaks volumes too.