KENS | Denver Post | San Antonio Express-News | Houston Chronicle
Murdered sports journalist Jessica Ghawi was remembered at a service in San Antonio Saturday. Eulogists mentioned her determination, her zest for life and her propensity to fall down.
San Antonio sports anchor Larry Ramirez said an “invisible banana peel” followed her through life, as exemplified by the now-famous YouTube video of Ghawi, who reported under the name Jessica Redfield, slipping repeatedly on a hockey rink’s ice as she interviewed a San Antonio Rampage player. The video was shown at the service.
Denver Post reporter Adrian Dater fills in a little bit about Ghawi’s life in Denver, where she moved to further her reporting career. She’d been laid off by a sushi restaurant a few days before she was shot during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in a horrific act of mass murder. “Ghawi was figuratively knocked down plenty during her year of living in Denver,” Dater writes. “But the tenaciously ambitious, self-described ‘red-headed spitfire from Texas’ was a fighter, and nothing was going to keep her from pursuing big dreams.”
Pursuing those dreams meant internships at a Denver radio station and a television station, Dater writes, as well as studying journalism at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Ghawi’s friend Peter Burns, a radio host in Denver, spoke, as did her boyfriend, hockey player Jay Meloff, and her brother Jordan Ghawi.
Ghawi’s friend Brent Lowak attended the cinema with her that night and was wounded; he is without health insurance and friends are raising money for him. Some Denver hospitals have said they’ll void or reduce bills for uninsured shooting victims.
Previously: Sports journalist Jessica Ghawi dies in Colorado theater shooting | Public tributes reflect sports journalist Jessica Ghawi’s very public life | Jessica Ghawi scholarship raises more than $30,000 in a day
