'She was such a force': friends share memories of Lafayette shooting victims
'She was such a force': friends share memories of Lafayette shooting victims
Jillian Johnson – ‘a big part of the fabric’ of the city’s arts community – and Mayci Breaux, who was preparing for radiology school, to be laid to rest on Monday.
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Mourners attend a vigil to honor the victims of Thursday night’s shooting. Photograph: Brynn Anderson/AP
Under a dimming sky, hundreds of residents from across Acadiana, the Francophone area of Louisiana, gathered at a park in downtown Lafayette. They were there to mourn Mayci Breaux and Jillian Johnson, two women who were killed on Thursday in a shooting rampage at a movie theater.
They held white candles and joined each other in signing a sorrowful round of This Little Light of Mine, led by friends and bandmates of Johnson. It seemed everyone had a story or favorite memory to share. Johnson, who was 33, was well-known around Lafayette, a conduit connecting local artists, musicians and designers.
“She was such a force,” said Tom Krueger, a New York-based film-maker who had lived and worked in Lafayette. He said Johnson and her band, The Figs, were a big part of the reason he moved to the city in 2007.
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When he learned that Johnson had been killed, he said, he drove straight from Tennessee, where he was working. Krueger said it was still hard to accept that an outsider, identified by police as John Russell Houser, had chosen Lafayette to carry out his attack.
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Like Johnson, Breaux, 21, had accomplished much at a young age, and had a bright future ahead. A beauty queen from Franklin, a small town about an hour south-east of Lafayette, Breaux was scheduled to begin radiology school at Lafayette General, where five of the shooting victims were treated.
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/27/lafayette-shooting-victims-jillian-johnson-mayci-breaux?CMP=ema_565
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