By KIRK SEMPLE


When he recalls the blur of events that followed the death of his 14-year-old son from an accidental shooting in Queens six years ago, Ivan Echeverry can still feel the smothering shame of having to raise money for the cremation and funeral.

Mr. Echeverry was an immigrant from Medellin, Colombia, working as a construction laborer - and broke. With the help of a civic leader in the Colombian community of Jackson Heights, Queens, he was able to raise $1,200 at a Lions Club meeting in one evening. Friends contributed a little more.

“This pained me,” said Mr. Echeverry, 47, who now sells DVDs and CDs at a store in the neighborhood. “I am not a beggar.”

The bind he faced is common among New York’s immigrant poor. In Jackson Heights, business owners say that at least once a week, someone drops by asking for donations to pay for a funeral here, like that of Mr. Echeverry’s son, or a flight to carry the body back home - expenses that can amount to several thousand dollars.

But a company created by four prominent funeral businesses in Colombia has come up with an alternative that appears to be unusual among immigrant groups in New York: burial insurance for all those costs.

The insurance, with rates starting at $4.12 per person per month, is available to both legal and illegal immigrants from Colombia and covers many post-mortem expenses, including picking up the body, transporting it - or the cremated ashes - by plane to Colombia, and helping to arrange a funeral service and burial in that country or in the United States.

“Normally, Colombians in the United States aren’t prepared for death here,” said Mauricio Palacios, 29, the director of the company, Prevision Exequial Colombia, which operates in a shopping mall on Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights. “We’re preoccupied with achieving the American dream.”

“But,” he added, “it’s very expensive to die in the United States.”

Prevision Exequial Colombia is part of a new niche in the American funeral industry in the past few years, catering to Mexicans, Ecuadoreans and Filipinos, said officials at the National Funeral Directors Association, a trade group in Wisconsin.

As Orlando Tobon, a civic leader of Jackson Heights’ Colombians said, “it’s a solution to a very big problem: Nobody thinks they’re going to die and nobody ever saves for a burial.”