Friends who witnessed the random gunning down of a 15-year-old Chicago girl less than a week after she performed at President Obama’s inauguration continue to grapple with the senseless loss of the prep school honors student.

“She was honestly like the happiest person I know and I don’t know, like, how to cope with this because it shouldn’t have been her,” an emotional Klyn Jones said of her friend, Hadiya Pendleton. “It shouldn’t have been anyone but especially not her.”

Pendleton was killed Tuesday afternoon in a quiet south-side neighborhood less than a mile from Obama’s Chicago home. She was huddling with Jones and other friends under a canopy to escape the rain when an unidentified gunman came at them, opened fire, and then escaped the scene in a car.

More from Eun Kyung Kim @ Today

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