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It looked like almost any back-to-school shopping trip, with vans full of eager children unloading at the Kmart store in Edgewood.

But the only men on the trip Monday evening were the van drivers.

"That's the madness," said Vaughn Tarrant, one of the two men who drove more than 50 of Pittsburgh's widows and children to the store to shop for school clothes with money given to them by the Tree of Hope charity.

"It helps and it hurts. It's so sad to see how many of us there are," said Shalone Wilson, 30, of Stanton Heights, as she picked out T-shirts for her son, 9.

"I'm John Farley III," he said. His father, John Farley Jr., was 25 when he was shot to death on Mt. Washington in 1992.

Farley poked around looking for just the right-sized backpack.

"I need a big book bag because I'm in the fourth grade. Last year, I had a lot of homework, and this year I'm going to have more."

The mothers and children traveled from East Liberty to Edgewood, where the kids swarmed the store to shop with $50 vouchers. Each was good for $100 worth of merchandise because Kmart gave them half off.

"We had about eight different families saying, `We don't know how we're going to send our kids to school,'" said Adrienne Young, executive director of Tree of Hope, a faith-based charity.

The outing was a chance for widows and their children to heal a little, too, Young said.

"These are fathers who left behind three, four, five children. After the father is buried, everyone thinks the story is over. That's when the nightmare begins," she said. "This is more than getting a new outfit."

Losing the husband, boyfriend or father who paid the bills makes the loss all that more difficult to deal with, said Angie Barlow, a mother of five whose husband, Sidney Barlow, was shot breaking up an argument after a Thanksgiving Day football game in Garfield in 1999.

"It's like the bottom falls out from underneath you," said Barlow, who shopped for Janea, 9, and Jay, 8. She had worked at a National City Bank branch, but resigned because the trial of the man accused of shooting her husband is about to begin.

Yesterday was four years to the day that Tanya Maddox's boyfriend, Todd Snyder, was shot four times in Homewood while yelling at a man committing a burglary.

His daughter, Tanille, was 6 months old at the time.

"She'll say stuff that will make me cry, like, `I wish I had a daddy to do stuff with,'" said Maddox, 24, of Duquesne.

She usually spends the anniversary of her boyfriend's death like a zombie, "just sitting around the house." Yesterday was the first time she did any activities with other members of the Tree of Hope.

Standing in line with a cart full of clothes, school supplies and a backpack, Maddox said the outing helped her cope.

"This got me motivated," she said.

Some said the shopping trip was a good chance to talk, but most really needed the financial help, too.

"It was a blessing. I didn't know what I was going to do when they went to school," said Michelle Saunders, 21, of McKees Rocks. Her boyfriend, Jamie Daniels, was killed Feb. 12 on the South Side.

She and a friend kept a tally of how much they were spending as they picked up underwear, pants and shirts for two of the couples' four children.

"I just went to court because I couldn't pay my rent. I'm still depressed," Saunders said about the unsolved murder. "People don't know how it is."

Marc Lukasiak can be reached at mlukasiak@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7939.

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