One sign. Five candy-colored letters.

In a time of mass protests, loud demonstrations, fear and outrage on such a large scale, one quiet little sign above the freeway can still evoke such a gut-punch of a memory.

The sign on the H-1 pedestrian overpass simply says, “Cyrus.”

Perhaps you just caught your breath because you remember what happened and how, the more we learned about this child’s life, the more we realized it was as tragic as his horrible death.

Cyrus Belt was just 23 months old when on Jan. 17, 2008, a man high on crystal methamphetamine took him from his apartment and threw him off the H-1 freeway Miller Street overpass 25 feet down into midday traffic.

Twenty-three-year-old Matthew M. Higa was arrested that day. In February 2010 he was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

During Higa’s trial, testimony from witnesses painted a bleak picture of the murdered child’s life, where, as one writer put it, “virtually every adult in Cyrus’ life was smoking crystal methamphetamine in the hours before and after the little boy died.”

Cyrus’ mother, Nancy Chanco, said she had left the boy at the apartment with her boyfriend and her father so she could go to a Chinatown gambling parlor to smoke “ice.” After that she testified that she and her boyfriend spent hours at the mall trying to steal from stores to support their drug habits. Meanwhile, baby Cyrus was left at home with his grandfather, who was dozing as the child wandered off on his own. Higa, a neighbor and drug buddy of Cyrus’ mother, got a hold of him.

In the days and weeks after the murder of Cyrus Belt, the Miller Street overpass was covered with flowers and teddy bears and posters and regret. The heartbreak in the community was matched only by the outrage. The spontaneous memorial got so large that the state Department of Transportation had to step in and, with a measure of diplomacy and dignity, take it down.

There were promises made back then that have faded with time, promises that no other child would ever have to live and die that way. Higa’s conviction served as closure — there was someone to blame and someone to punish. And over time the problems of depraved indifference induced by crystal meth, a social support system with holes big enough for a baby to fall through and a community that didn’t know how to help became overshadowed by the number of children growing up in sidewalk shanties.

But somebody remembered and made that handwritten sign, the letters in cheerful pastel colors like something you’d put up on the wall in a baby’s room.

Nine years later someone thought of that boy perhaps not as a symbol of the system’s failure or as a rallying cry for social justice, but as an individual, a life, a boy who should have been in the fifth grade now.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.