Vern Londivazo

Somebody that beautiful, that loving, that kind could be taken away. There's something wrong. I already knew the world was a mess. If you don't understand that or realize that, you're not paying attention to that.

I heard a commotion outside. I'm not sure I heard neighbors and something about kids being down. And then as I was sitting there trying to process that, I heard Bianca. I got something about kids, and there was just something in her voice saying something was wrong, something was horribly wrong. And as I was coming out of the room to try to find out what was going on, I heard the front door close.

And by the time I got to it, Bianca wasn't there. So when I went outside, she was already running down the street, and I was kind of caught after, where are you going, what are you doing?

As I was driving down there, it's right down the corner, I remember everyone coming and stopping the trucks. So I stopped. And I called her cell phone. And I don't know if it rang. It maybe rang only one time. But somebody answered the phone. And instantly what I heard was screaming. I didn't know. There was a white fog around everything except for Lauren. I saw Lauren lying there.

And she wasn't covered, and I was moving around with her. And I just remember standing at the crime scene tape. They wouldn't let them go to her. And I could hear Donna screaming in the background, but that was about all I could hear, and just looking at her and wondering.

So they led me into the ambulance and as we were sitting there and they were working on her and I was looking back at that and that was the first time I had noticed the blood. I didn't notice the blood while she was lying there but when I looked back I could see her hair and there was blood on her hair.

And he did come in when one of the men came in. And Bianca, when she fell to her knees and started screaming, I was trying to tell her, no, it's not that. They're just here to tell us what they're going to do with her. And that's when they told us that she was gone.

There's always something about Lauren, and I know all parents have that feeling about their children. There's something special about that child. But even in comparison to my sons, there was just something about Lauren. It's hard to explain, just that she seemed so much wiser than her years. She always said, I remember even being two or three years old,

looking over and seeing her look at me and the way she was looking at me, there was something going on behind there and it just seemed she was just so much more advanced than you would think a child would be as far as her compassion for people, her kindness, just how tender she was with other people.

I think probably what made me the proudest was just how she interacted with people, especially younger children, how kind she was to them. I never saw her once be mean to somebody, say a mean thing. Quite the opposite. She went out of her way. If she knew that somebody was troubled, she went out of her way to reach out to that person.