An aspiring sportscaster who last month escaped a deadly shooting at a Toronto shopping mall was among the victims in Friday’s Aurora theater shooting.
Jessica Ghawi, who was known professionally as Jessica Redfield, was killed in the shooting, according to online reports by her friends. On the Mile High Hockey blog, Cheryl Bradley said Ghawi had recently received media credentials for the Colorado Avalanche.
“She was smart, friendly, and amazing,” Bradley wrote. “A red head through and through, she was a ball of energy and fire, with a quick wit and an infectious personality.”
On her Twitter account, Ghawi posted that she was attending a midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
One of her last tweets said, “Never thought I’d have to coerce a guy into seeing the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises with me.”
On Twitter, professional hockey player Jay Meloff — whom Bradley writes in her post was Ghawi’s boyfriend — wrote: “140 (characters) could never do you justice. Nor could all the words in this world. Never wanted to fall asleep because it meant missing time with you.”
“Every experience in life was amplified beyond my wildest dreams with you,” he wrote in a separate post.
Ghawi was originally from San Antonio.
Ghawi’s brother, Jordan Ghawi, wrote on his blog that his sister was attending the movie with a friend. The friend, who was injured in the shooting, told Jordan Ghawi that Jessica was shot twice. Jordan wrote that his mother called him at 2:15 a.m. Friday to tell him about the shooting and that he quickly booked a flight to Denver.
“At this time,” he wrote early Friday, “I do not have confirmation that she is alive or dead.”
In June, Ghawi escaped harm in a shooting at a Toronto shopping mall that killed one and injured four others. On her blog, Ghawi wrote that she decided to leave the scene of the shooting just moments before it occurred.
“This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away,” she 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.”
Later in the post, she added: “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?”
In a blog post, Denver Post hockey writer Adrian Dater wrote that he viewed Ghawi as a little sister. Ghawi was interning at a radio station, Dater wrote, and he frequently talked with her about other career opportunities. Dater wrote that she recently moved to an apartment in Aurora and was excited to have her own place.
“She talked about how well things were going with her boyfriend,” Dater wrote. “I felt like a big brother to her. She was very smart and very funny. Just a nice person. She definitely would have made it in the sports media business.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold