Milisav Dakic said his wife had warned him not to let the children play outside their Serb enclave in Kosovo. But the summer heat was stifling, and the nearby stream was a popular place to cool off.
Dozens of kids were playing near the dirty water on August 13 last year when a gunman behind the bushes on the far bank sprayed them with bullets.
Dakic's 13-year-old son Panta and 19-year-old Ivan Jovovic were killed. Four others were seriously injured in an attack shocking even by Kosovo's brutal standards.
The gunman - presumed to be an ethnic Albanian - has yet to be found, adding to the list of unsolved ethnic crimes that hang over the UN protectorate.
"If God had wanted to take them from such a crowd, perhaps that means they were blessed," said Dakic, dressed in black ahead of Friday's memorial service in Gorazdevac, a Serb hamlet in western Kosovo protected by Nato peacekeepers.
"When you pick a flower from a garden, don't you pick the most beautiful one?" the 40-year-old said.
Dakic said he hasn't heard from the United Nations police investigating the case in six months, accusing them of preferring to let the killer go than risk violence in a possible confrontation with local Albanians.
Police say the gunman probably fled to a nearby village where investigators were stymied.
Following the withdrawal of Serb forces in 1999 and the deployment of Nato troops, Serbs and other minorities became the target of frequent revenge attacks by Albanians bitter at years of heavy repression under former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.
After an apparent lull, the attacks resumed last year, including a frenzied axe attack on three members of a Serb family and the shooting of a fisherman. Like the Gorazdevac killings, the perpetrators have yet to be found.
Western efforts to bridge Kosovo's ethnic divide were dealt another major blow in March this year when ethnic Albanians rampaged through the province, setting fire to homes and religious sites belonging to Serbs and other minorities.
Nineteen people, Serbs and Albanians, died and 800 homes were destroyed in attacks which Western officials blamed on Albanian extremists. Some 4,000 people were left homeless.
Serb leaders in the province say the aim was to sow fear in a bid to drive out the remaining 100,000 Serbs from Kosovo, whose majority Albanians demand independence from Belgrade. A total of 180,000 have left since 1999.
"The fewer Serbs there are, the easier it is to build a country," said local Serb politician Marko Jaksic.
Observers say solving ethnically-related crime is crucial for UN efforts to break Kosovo's cycle of revenge and build a multi-ethnic society before any decision on its final status. Kosovo remains formally part of the Serbia and Montenegro union.
"Such cases allegedly involving an inter-ethnic aspect and in which no one is brought to justice have a quite devastating effect on the process of improving inter-ethnic relations," said Kosovo ombudsman Marek Novicki, a Polish human rights lawyer.
UN police spokesman Neeraj Singh said the number of Serbs murdered had gradually fallen since 1999.
"Most of the major cases have been solved," he said, pointing to the recent arrest of an ethnic Albanian man for the killing of 11 Serbs in a bus bombing in February 2001.
Gorazdevac was left untouched in the March violence, but has suffered as much over time. Low wooden porches and crooked stone walls carve out narrow streets left silent by a gradual exodus of more than 1,500 people in the five years since the 1999 Kosovo war.
Unable to farm their land and dependent on handouts from the Serbian authorities in Belgrade, the 800 that remain in Gorazdevac live a grim existence within a one-kilometre perimeter guarded by Romanian and Italian soldiers.
On a scrap of bumpy turf, locals stage a football tournament held every August since 1966. Back then, 25 multi-ethnic teams competed for a cash prize. This year there were six - all Serb.
"I don't see a life here for my family," said Dakic, who has two other children, a boy and a girl. Asked how he regards the future, he replied: "Only with a wall, between us and them".
The Gorazdevac killings happened just an hour after the arrival of new UN governor Harri Holkeri. Officials said they believed the attack, not the first to coincide with a high-profile visit, was a warning to the United Nations.
Holkeri pledged a swift investigation, but resigned in the wake of the March riots citing fatigue. His successor, Danish diplomat Soren Jessen-Petersen, officially takes up the post on August 16 as the fifth head of the Kosovo mission since 1999.
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