Teen killed at Texas school is laid to rest
KARACHI, Pakistan — Sabika Sheikh finally returned to her family in Pakistan on Wednesday from her months away as a foreign exchange student in Texas. Her father was the first to meet her coffin, draped by a Pakistani flag, at Karachi’s airport in the dark of the early morning.
Army cadets loaded the 17-year-old’s coffin into an ambulance as dozens of sobbing family members and friends recited Quran verses. Doors shut, a siren flipped on and the ambulance took Sabika’s body and immediate family home for a burial ceremony. The acting U.S. consul general, John Warner, choked back tears on the tarmac as he comforted a friend of Sabika’s.
Sabika was one of 10 killed when another student opened fire last week at Santa Fe High School in Texas with guns he had taken from his father. Family members said Sabika had loved her time there and had hoped it would help realize her dream of becoming a diplomat and working for peace.
A youth ambassador, Sabika was sent to Texas by an initiative sponsored by the State Department called the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program, known as YES. The program sent about 900 students from all over the world this year to live with U.S. families and attend local high schools in nearly every state of the country.
The six-month program is one of many sponsored by the State Department that aims to show students a positive side of the United States and cultivate ties with potential future leaders abroad, top-grade students like Sabika with ambition.
But Sabika was determined that the influence would go both ways, that she would present the best face Pakistan had to offer to Americans.
She was on a mission, friends and family say, to change U.S. views on Islam and convince those she met that hers was not a violent religion.
That she became a victim of violence herself there, right in her school, horrified her friends and family who were counting the days till her return.