CLEVELAND — Monday’s mass shooting inside a Boulder, Colorado supermarket is hitting close to home in Ohio, as family and friends remember Lynn Murray.
Murray, a Mentor native, is one of the 10 people who lost her life during the massacre.
Her fellow classmates in the Mentor High School graduating class of 1977 gathered in front of the school Saturday to honor one of their own.
“She was one of us. She is one of us. She will always be one of us,” said Dan Page, who sang in the choir with Murray in school.
Now a pastor, Page led the memorial service.
“A quote I shared from the ‘Shawshank Redemption’ is classic: ‘Get busy living or get busy dying,’” he said. “Lynn was busy living and we’re grateful for that.”
The group gathered near the flag pole outside the school where a memorial of bright bouquets surrounded a photo of a young Murray.
“She was always happy,” Evelyn Kiffmeyer said. “She made everyone else happy. We just had a fun time in life.”
Kiffmeyer’s son married Murray’s sister.
She said she always looked forward to seeing Murray at family gatherings.
“That’s just the way she was,” said Kiffmeyer, holding a photo of a smiling Murray. “She was always smiling. Happy go lucky, funny.”
In the graduating class of nearly 800 students, peers said Murray stood out.
“Very sweet, very kind,” Monique LaFortune said. “One of those people that if we were at a reunion and someone said, ‘Lynn Murray’s here,’ I’d be going, ‘Oh, where? Where? I haven’t seen her since graduation.’”
The community is now struggling to make sense of a senseless situation.
“We’ve had a lot of classmates who’ve passed naturally, but this was not natural,” LaFortune said.
“This was a person that I knew, and how dare you take her from us like that,” Leighsa Parisi-Delaney said.
But Parisi-Delaney said she’s thankful for the joy and gifts Murray shared with the world.
“We wanted to let her family know that we’re stopping for her and taking this time to honor her,” LaFortune said.
