Helena Ramsay

An introvert with a wicked wit, she surrounded her life with nature and travel — even in her dreams: She fantasized about seeing pink dolphins in the Amazon rain forest and studying abroad after high school.

Even more, Helena Ramsay, 17, loved nature at home, avidly tending to her plot at the Rotary Community Garden and Food Forest in Coral Springs with her mother, Anne Ramsay.

"She was blossoming. She would have definitely been a leader," Anne told the Associated Press last year. When Helena was 2, the Ramsays moved to Coral Springs from Portsmouth, England, to live closer to Anne’s parents.

At Stoneman Douglas, the junior cared deeply about human rights, serving in the school’s United Nations Model Club and First Priority Club, a Christian youth organization. But travel never strayed far from Helena’s thoughts: She planned to study environmental science overseas, taking after her London-born mother, who graduated with a science degree. During her freshman year, Helena and a student group traveled to Barcelona, London and Paris

with her teacher, Ivy Schamis.

Friends remember Helena as smart and compassionate yet quiet — until you met her, and then she was ebullient, eager to share her quirks. Samantha Grady, who met her best friend in seventh grade civics class at Sawgrass Middle School, calls her fiercely devoted to her cats. Anne, Helena and her brother, Ellis, would adopt whole litters and have them spayed and neutered at Cat Adoptions in Margate.

Grady says they bonded best over music — Twenty One Pilots, Lana Del Rey — but especially over Korean pop bands and “K-dramas,” or Korean soap operas.

“We were always talking about the characters,” says Grady, who says that “Descendants of the Sun” was Helena’s favorite K-drama. “Helena really paid attention to what you said and stuck up for what she believed in. I once said, randomly, ‘I love fuzzy socks!’ and every year for my birthday, she gets me fuzzy socks.”