Bailey - This grieving mountain town celebrated the short life of Emily Keyes on Saturday after a hostage standoff left the 16-year-old fatally wounded in her English classroom three days earlier.
Echoing a text message the Platte Canyon High School junior sent her dad in the hours before her fatal shooting, the memorial service started with Emily's own words: "I love U guys."
That message - originally meant for parents John-Michael and Ellen and twin brother Casey - washed over hundreds of relatives, schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, rescue workers and sympathetic strangers, leaving most of the crowd in tears.
Gathered along the north fork of the South Platte River under Saturday's cloudless sky, the mourners strove to remember Emily's life, not her brutal death. A desire to find meaning in the seeming randomness of Wednesday's attack inspired the group to wear pink ribbons reading "Random Acts of Kindness for Emily."
"Emily was a part of my life and a part of all of your lives. ... That part was torn away and stolen this Wednesday," Casey Keyes said at the service. "But the part of us that can never be torn away and never be stolen is the love and strength that keeps us together."
The name of carpenter Duane Morrison, the 53-year-old hostage-taker and gunman, wasn't mentioned.
"You will always be loved"
Instead, the mourners focused on collages of Emily's childhood photos - her first Halloween costume, baths with her brother as a toddler and rides on a merry-go-round as a grade- schooler. In most of the pictures, she hugged her family, hugged her pets and hugged her friends.
"Happy B-Day Mommy! I love you so much. I hope I can be the best daughter to you. You deserve it," read one card she wrote for her mom.
Speakers remembered Emily's smile, her ease at forgiveness and the lavishness of her affections. They recalled her love of loud music and how she delighted in riding the kiddie coaster at Six Flags Elitch Gardens.
They spoke of her in both the present and past tense.
Among the messages friends wrote with markers on a white blanket laid out after Saturday's service: "You made such an impact on my life," "You will always be loved and never forgotten" and "I never thought I would see this day."
For many of the teens in attendance, it was their first time mourning.
"I changed a million times because I didn't know what to wear to a funeral. So I picked this because it was Emily's favorite color," said one Platte Canyon student in a shirt of the same pale pink as the ribbons hung throughout town in Emily's memory.
Other students stood in a circle before the service talking about Wednesday's attack as if they had not spoken of it before.
"It could have been any one of us," said one girl.
Striking silences
Before, during and after Saturday's service, clusters of students, teachers and rescue workers stood embracing one another in long, intense hugs.
"This is the hardest thing that I'll ever face," said Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener, a speaker at the service. "And I want the Keyes family to know that if I could trade places with Emily, I'd do it in a heartbeat. That wasn't supposed to happen. Going into a school wasn't supposed to happen."
Wegener continued: "I hope I do this community proud. And I hope you'll let me know if I don't."
Two of Saturday's speakers urged the crowd to free themselves from guilt that somehow they could have saved Emily.
"You couldn't have done any more. That man had a gun," said Platte Canyon speech teacher Ruth Barth.
"Let that go. You need to let it go. There's nothing you can do," added Jay Vonesh, a youth pastor at Platte Canyon Community Church.
"We need to go forward in Emily's name and Emily's honor and turn this random act into random acts of kindness," Vonesh added.
"Let's live and love extravagantly in ways that don't make sense, in ways that make other people wonder what you're up to."
Despite the many remembrances and songs Emily's friends played in her honor, the most striking parts of Saturday's two-hour memorial were its silences.
For 15 minutes before the service and 10 minutes after, at least 1,000 mourners stood so quietly they could hear the aspen rustling and the river running nearby.
People along the aisles reached out and touched Emily's parents and brother as they entered and exited, tightly clutching onto one another.
They came and went accompanied by a quarter-mile procession of police cars and rescue vehicles that slowly wound in, then out of the canyon, its aspen fully golden and wrapped with ribbons in pale pink.
