TwitterBlogger and journalist Jessica Ghawi has been confirmed as one of the dozen dead following Friday morning's shooting rampage at a suburban Denver screening of The Dark Knight Rises.
Her death was confirmed via Twitter by her brother, Jordan. "Coroner's office confirms that my sister @jessicaredfield has died of injuries sustained in the shooting," he wrote.
Jessica died just six weeks after narrowly surviving another mass shooting—a June 2 incident in Toronto's Eaton Centre, which left two dead and several others wounded, and became fodder for her sports blog.
Ghawi, who wrote under the name Jessica Redfield, described the "sickening feeling" she got while at Eaton moments before a gunman had opened fire there.
"This empty, almost sickening feeling won't go away," she wrote on June 5. "I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court," she wrote on her blog. "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."
She had reportedly moved from San Antonio to Denver, where she attended the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises with a friend.
In the moments leading up to the shooting, she posted several tweets.
"Of course we're seeing Dark Knight," she wrote at 10:22 p.m. "Redheaded Texan spitfire, people should never argue with me. Maybe I should get in on those NHL talks..."
She later responded to another follower who asked why she was still tweeting when she was supposed to be watching the film: "MOVIE DOESN'T START FOR 20 MINUTES."
In a blog post, Jordan Gwahi recounted the horrific details as his family learned about the tragedy:
"At approximately 0215 CST, I received an hysterical, and almost unintelligible, phone call from my mother stating that my sister, Jessica Ghawi, had been shot while attending the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Denver, CO."
"I was able to contact the man that was with my sister, mutual friend Brent, who stated that they were in the theatre when an incendiary device was fired into the crowd and that shots rang out immediately afterwards. Brent further stated that he took two rounds and that my sister took one round followed by an additional round which appeared to strike her in the head."
On her blog, Ghawi had described herself as a "feisty redhead" sports journalist who was proudly "Yankee born, Texas raised, Colorado blooming."
The gunman has been identified as 24-year-old James Holmes, who was arrested at a parking lot behind the theater shortly afterward.