“She would text me randomly out of the blue just sending me a bunch of smiley faces and a bunch of different ones, a smiley face, a heart...and then she would just say, ‘this is how I feel about you, this is how you make me feel,’” said Gabriella D. Czarniak ’17, another of Rue’s friends. “I can’t imagine I was the only one receiving those messages.”
Sure enough, after the recent death of Akbari’s grandmother, Rue sent a series of text messages to console her friend.
“I don’t want my funeral to be boring,” Rue wrote in the text message. “I just want the people who show up to be really bizarre and interesting because that will be all my friends.”
Friends, family, and affiliates of Rue’s high school and her church, Our Savior Lutheran Church in Tacoma, held a prayer service on Sunday attended by several hundred people, according to the Tacoma News Tribune. As of the time of publication, the College had not announced any plans for a memorial service of its own.
—Staff writer Ivan B. K. Levingston can be reached at Ivan.Levingston@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @IvanLevingston.
—Staff writer Tyler S. Olkowski can be reached at tyler.olkowski@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @OlkowskiTyler.