DeEbony Groves, 21

Groves was a college senior who worked two jobs, taking shifts when she could step away from her classes and homework at Belmont University in Nashville. Despite her busy schedule, Groves always found time to visit her grandmother.

“Every chance she could get,” her grandmother, Carolyn Groves, said in an interview.

The visits were usually spur of the moment. Groves would call her grandmother before lunchtime, say she wanted to spend the day with her and then head to her home in Portland, northeast of Nashville. She always brought food, either a sub sandwich to split or McDonald’s.

“She was a sweetheart,” her grandmother said.

Groves grew up in Gallatin and attended Gallatin High School. She made the Lady Green Wave varsity basketball team as a sophomore. She rarely led the team in scoring, but she was the squad’s top defender and was often assigned to guard the opposing team’s best player, her former coach, Kim Kendrick, told The Tennessean.

“She was a great role model for the other players,” Kendrick said.

After she graduated from high school in 2014, Groves followed her brother to Belmont University, a liberal arts college whose campus is at the end of Music Row.

She also joined the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and was eating with some of her sisters at the Waffle House on Sunday morning.

She first majored in nursing but later changed her focus to social work. Her grandmother said she loved to help people.

“The entire campus community is shocked and devastated by how such senseless violence has taken the life of this young woman, an individual full of immense potential,” the school said in a statement.

She was set to graduate in two weeks.