Shooting victim just missed Eaton Centre gunfire

One of the victims of the Colorado movie theatre shooting narrowly missed witnessing another shooting — in the food court at Toronto's Eaton Centre last month.

News of the shooting at The Dark Knight Rises premiere first broke on Twitter early Friday morning from panicked moviegoers trying to make sense of what they'd just experienced.

And as the morning wore on and the police investigation continued, the name of one of the victims appeared on Twitter.

"My friend Jessica Ghawi was killed in the #Aurora Shooting — she was an aspiring sportscaster — she will be missed," Natalie Tejeda (@natalietejeda) tweeted Friday morning.

Ghawi's parents told KSAT-TV in San Antonio, Texas, that their daughter, who had recently moved to Denver, was killed in the shooting, the station reported.

Ghawi's brother Jordan wrote on his blog that their mutual friend, who was with Ghawi at the theatre, said Ghawi was shot twice, and the second bullet "appeared to strike her in the head."

Ghawi, who went by the Twitter handle @JessicaRedfield, last tweeted "MOVIE DOESN'T START FOR 20 MINUTES," just after 10:30 p.m. local time to another Twitter user whom she'd been teasing for not going to the premiere.

And 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.

Busted Coverage, a sports blog Ghawi wrote for, tweeted a link to her last blog post.

She had been at the Eaton Centre and grabbed a burger and poutine in the food court. She had initially been looking for sushi — which would have led her to the sit-down sushi restaurant and prolonged her time in the food court — but "an odd feeling" 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.

The receipt for her burger was time-stamped 6:20 p.m. Gunshots rang out in the food court only minutes later.

Outside the mall, chaos descended on the streets as emergency vehicles arrived on scene.

"Standing there in the midst of the chaos all around us, police started yelling to get back and make room. I saw a young shirtless boy, writhing on a stretcher, with his face and head covered by the EMS as they rushed him by us to get him into an ambulance," Ghawi wrote. "The moment was surprisingly calm. The EMTs helping the boy weren't yelling orders and no one was screaming like a night time medical drama. It was as if it was one swift movement to get the boy out of the mall and into the ambulance. 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."

culled from ifpress.com