Colorado Springs – She was one of them.
Julie Rifkin took her sons to soccer games, carpooled with other families and volunteered at church.
The triple funeral Saturday of a Colorado Springs woman and the two sons she shot was an homage to their relatively ordinary life.
But it didn’t answer the question of how someone who seemed every inch the loving mother could pull out a .38-caliber pistol and kill her children as they slept.
“What happened had to be the deepest, darkest thing that can happen to a human mind,” said Julia Melendez, a longtime friend who volunteered with Rifkin at New Life Church.
Melendez said that their circle of friends knew Rifkin, 41, suffered from depression and that she was under a doctor’s care. But she also knew her as a sensitive, caring person who devoted her life to her children.
The funeral at New Life Church, attended by an estimated 1,000 people, came a week after Julie Rifkin bought a gun from a pawn shop and shot Nathan, 13, and Gabriel, 12.
She reportedly was despondent after hearing she was going to lose her job.
New Life Senior Pastor Ted Haggard last week had criticized staffers at Memorial Hospital, where Julie Rifkin was taken for evaluation at the request of friends who feared she was suicidal. She was released by the hospital and within a day and a half shot her children and herself.
On Saturday, Haggard spoke of heaven and faith from the pulpit, but after the service he continued to ask questions about her treatment.
The head of Memorial Hospital’s emergency room has publicly defended Rifkin’s psychiatric screening, saying standard protocol was followed.
The funeral included a montage of Rifkin family photos projected on a screen above the church pulpit. There were images of the boys getting haircuts, big-eyed baby pictures and snapshots of the boys romping in snow up to their knees.
Donald Rifkin, Julie’s husband and father of the boys, spoke about the birth of his sons, how their names were chosen and how Julie would let the boys have messy birthday cake when they were toddlers.
“Julie, Nathan and Gabe, I love you,” he said as he walked from the pulpit, sat down before the coffins holding his family and silently cried.
Staff writer Alicia Caldwell can be reached at 303-820-1930 or acaldwell@denverpost.com.
