Friday, July 20, 2012

AURORA TRAGEDY TAKES LIFE OF JAY MELOFF'S GIRLFRIEND

The previous post mentioned young Jay Meloff, who played for Brockport in the first semester of last season.

It's saddening to report that Jay's girlfriend was among those murdered in last night's shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Here's the report from The Daily News....



An aspiring sportscaster who cheated death at a Toronto shopping mall shooting last month is one of the 12 dead in the Colorado movie massacre.

Jessica Ghawi was watching “The Dark Knight Rises” with a long-time friend when a gunman opened fire minutes into the the midnight premiere.

“MOVIE DOESN’T START FOR 20 MINUTES,” she wrote in her last Twitter post to a hockey writer pal.

Ghawi, who wrote under the name Jessica Redfield, worked for sports website Busted Coverage and her chilling final post on her personal blog describes her near miss at the Eaton Center mall shooting in Toronto June 2 where seven were injured and one died.

“I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away,” Ghawi wrote. “I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court.

“An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm’s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting.”

Ghawi grew up in San Antonio, Texas, but recently moved to Denver, her family told KENS 5 News.

Her firefighter brother, Jordan Ghawi, said he was woken by a call from his mother in the early hours of Friday who was “hysterical, and almost unintelligible,” according to a post on his website.

“I was able to contact the man that was with my sister, mutual friend Brent Lowak, who states that they were in the theater when an incendiary device was fired into the crowds and that shots rang out immediately afterwards,” Jordan Ghawi wrote.

“Brent further stated that he took two rounds and that my my sister took one round followed by an additional round which appeared to strike her in the head.”

Jordan Ghawi jumped on a flight from San Antonio and touched down in Denver Friday morning.

“Well this could easily be the worst night of my life,” he wrote on Twitter before taking off.

“It appears that my sister has been fatally wounded in a mass shooting at a movie premiere in Denver, CO."


Source:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/aurora-victim-jessica-ghawi-survived-toronto-mall-shooting-month-article-1.1118365

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