Victim from Easton ‘passionate about helping’
‘She was just a joy like a bright light … always smiling, always kind. … She loved people.’ — LUCY MAGNUS former sorority sister of Christine Loeber
At the heart of Friday’s killings of three women in a hostage standoff at a sprawling California veterans’ home was a single terrible irony: The three victims, including an Easton native, had devoted their lives, friends say, to helping the kind of traumatized veteran who authorities say took their lives.
“If he had let her go, she would have forgiven him and got him the help he needed; that is who she was,” said Lucy Magnus, 48, of West Hartford, Conn., one of Christine Loeber’s former sorority sisters in Delta Zeta at the University of New Hampshire. “She was just a joy like a bright light … always smiling, always kind. … She loved people.”
A daylong siege at The Pathway Home in Yountville, Calif., ended Friday night, when police stormed the building and found the bodies of Loeber, the home’s executive director; Clinical Director Jennifer Golick, 42; Jennifer
Gonzales, 29, a clinical psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System; and the gunman, Albert Wong, 36, a former Army rifleman who served a year in Afghanistan from 2011 to 2012 and had been kicked out of the nonprofit post-traumatic stress disorder program at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville.
Loeber, 48, graduated in 1987 from Oliver Ames High School in North Easton and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in communication in 1991 from the University of New Hampshire.
“The university was devastated to learn she was a victim of such a senseless tragedy,” UNH said in a Facebook post
yesterday. “The thoughts and prayers of our entire Wildcat community are with her family and friends.”
After a stint as an affiliate-relations manager at New England Cable News, Loeber left to study social work at Boston College, earning her master’s degree in 2008.
“She distinguished herself at BC as a gifted student who was passionate about helping those suffering from mental illness and went on to a successful career in social work, serving veterans,” Jack Dunn, a university spokesman, said in a statement. “The prayers of the entire BC community are with the Loeber family in the wake of this senseless tragedy.”
Kristofer Hun, whose stepfather, Dan Cunningham, is a Vietnam veteran, said he met Loeber about three years ago, after she took over as The Pathway Home’s executive director.
“She was a breath of fresh air,” Hun said. “… She had a singular focus in trying to help these guys, with every breath, with everything in her core, just was about helping people. And she was an incredibly vibrant person, always had a smile on her face. When we would ask for her to come and speak about it, she couldn’t get there fast enough. She always had time in her schedule to promote The Pathway Home and the good work that they were doing.”
Friday’s siege “comes obviously as a shock to everybody,” he said. “It’s so uncharacteristic of what that program stands for, and it’s just still raw and still very shocking.”