A 15-year-old Chicago girl gunned down a week after she performed during President Obama’s inaugural festivities was remembered Wednesday as a “walking angel” – the last person her family could imagine dying by a bullet.
Hadiya Pendleton was an honor student, a marching-band majorette, and a doting big sister who thought about becoming a journalist or a pharmacist or even getting into politics after she witnessed history in Washington last week.
The biggest trouble the insatiable reader ever gave her parents: running up their credit card buying books on Amazon.
“I couldn’t ask for a better child,” her mother, Cleo Cowley, said through tears at her Chicago home. “She didn’t give me any hard time at all. She had a heart of gold.”
A sophomore at Chicago’s selective King College Prep High School, Pendleton was walking with fellow members of the volleyball team in a park Tuesday afternoon when the skies opened. They ducked under a canopy to get out of the rain, joining other teenagers.
At that moment, Chicago police say, a gunman came running down an alley behind the park, opened fire and then darted into a waiting vehicle and took off. No arrests have been made.
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