http://www.torontosun.com/2012/07/20/ba ... re-gunfire
Jessica Ghawi wrote a month ago on her blog how "an odd feeling" compelled her to leave Toronto's Eaton Centre right before a gunman opened fire in the food court, killing two. If she had the same feeling just after midnight in a theatre in a Denver suburb, she had no time to act on it.
The 24-year-old aspiring sportscaster from Texas was among the 12 victims in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.
Ghawi was remembered by friends and colleagues as an ambitious, smart, funny young woman determined to make it in sports journalism.
Ghawi, who used the name Jessica Redfield professionally, tweeted about her excitement leading up to the premiere of The Dark Knight rises.
"MOVIE DOESN'T START FOR 20 MINUTES," she tweeted to a friend she'd been teasing for not going to the premiere.
Not long after that, according to her brother, she was shot in the leg before being shot fatally in the head.
Brent Lowak, who was sitting beside her at the theatre, told Ghawi's brother from his hospital bed that they dove for cover when the suspect opened fire.
"Brent noticed that Jessica was no longer screaming. He advised that he looked over to Jessica and saw what appeared to be an entry wound to her head," Jordan Ghawi wrote on his blog Friday.
In an eerie coincidence, Ghawi's last entry on her personal blog was about witnessing the aftermath of the shooting in the Eaton Centre on June 2 that left two people dead and five others wounded.
She was in Toronto to visit her boyfriend, Jay Meloff, a hockey player from Markham, Ont.
She had grabbed a burger and poutine in the food court but "an odd feeling" that led her outside, she wrote.
"Gun crimes are fairly common where I grew up in Texas, but I never imagined I'd experience a violent crime first hand," she wrote on June 5.
Watching ambulances arrive and stretchers carry people out, she wrote: "That's when it really hit me. I felt nauseous. Who would go into a mall full of thousands of innocent people and open fire? Is this really the world we live in?
"I was shown how fragile life was on Saturday," she wrote a few days after the shooting. "I was reminded that we don't know when or where our time on Earth will end."
Adrian Dater, a sports columnist at the Denver Post said on his blog Friday that Ghawi was "very smart and very funny," and said she'd never forget what she saw in Toronto.
"She said something to the effect that if she'd been in a certain spot just a minute before, she likely would have been one of the victims," he wrote. "She talked about how lucky she was."
