Va. Beach victim was a loyal Steelers fan

It didn’t take Margaret “Missy” Langer long to get over a Steelers loss, but she loved it when they won.

When the Steelers beat her brother’s favorite team, the New England Patriots, last year, she texted him to gloat. “She’d say, ‘Oh, how’d you like that play, Fred?’” Fred Langer of East Liverpool, Ohio, recalled. “She’d be rubbing it in.”

The siblings didn’t let football get between them, though. Ms. Langer had been trying to persuade her brother to go to a Steelers game this coming season.

But Ms. Langer, 60, was one of a dozen people killed Friday in the mass shooting at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. She had been an employee in the public utilities department for 12 years.

Mr. Langer wasn’t sure about going to see the Steelers, but his younger sister insisted. “She probably could’ve talked me into it if I had the time to do that,” Mr. Langer said.

The siblings, along with their older sister, Debby, grew up in East Liverpool. “We had a great relationship. All three of us did. We had a lot of love in our family,” Mr. Langer said.

Ms. Langer graduated from Beaver Local High School in Ohio in 1977.

She was funny, with a beautiful personality, Mr. Langer said, and she always had a smile on her face and had many friends. Their mother also was a Steelers fan, he said, and after she died in 2014, she was buried with a sweatshirt that read, “It’s snowing black and gold.”

Ms. Langer loved the beach and Paul McCartney, so she moved to Virginia Beach over 20 years ago and kept a big poster of the Beatle in her spare bedroom.

Mr. Langer said he has been remembering their good times together, like when he, his wife and his parents visited his sister in Virginia Beach around 2004.

“Whenever we saw each other, we had that brother-sister bond,” he said.

A funeral will be held at 9:30 a.m Saturday in St. John Lutheran Church in East Liverpool. Ms. Langer will be buried next to her parents.