Remembering Kayla Ferrante

eeds children. Kayla's summer plan was to babysit her brother, go to college and volunteer weekly at the Little Lighthouse, where she could continue working with special needs children, as she had for her senior year at Memorial. Kayla was coming home earlier than expected because she was tired when someone fired a high powered weapon at her vehicle. One of the shots passed through the license plate, the back of the passenger seat exiting her chest and continuing through the windshield of the vehicle being driven by her boyfriend. This took place just yards from Kayla's front door – her mother came out to find her daughter bleeding from the gunshot wound, unable to speak or open her eyes though she was still breathing. Despite the efforts of her mother, paramedics and ultimately ER surgeons, Kayla died from her wound. Kayla and her boyfriend, Neikko, were doing nothing wrong; they were not participating in any high risk behavior and are not believed to have been the target of the shooter but none of that changes the fact that Kayla was murdered that night. In that moment, the future that Kayla, her family and friends had envisioned vanished… the life we knew was destroyed…

We now know that she was murdered because a gang member mistook the vehicle she was in as that of a rival gang member.