McALLEN, Texas—Two years ago when Cody and Marq Shafer planned their wedding, they knew best friend Rebecca Wingo had to be a part of it.
Wingo cried the night they asked her to participate, and she cried again that day in late July 2010 when she officiated their ceremony in Iowa, Cody Shafer of Aurora, Colo., said Sunday.
“That I’ll have forever,” Cody Shafer told The Associated Press on Sunday. “Her laughter and then breaking down in the middle of our ceremony and crying.”
Wingo, 32, also of Aurora, was among 12 people killed in a shooting rampage early Friday at a premiere of the new Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises” in the Denver suburb. The shooting left 58 people injured. James Holmes, 24, is being held without bond on suspicion of multiple counts of first-degree murder. He is scheduled for an initial court hearing Monday.
The Shafers heard about the shootings Friday morning and quickly sent messages to friends in the area asking if they were safe. Cody Shafer said he had no idea Wingo was at the movie, but received a Facebook message from someone in Texas who knew Wingo saying that no one had heard from her.
Wingo spent part of her childhood in Texas and graduated from high school in Quinlan, east of Dallas.
The Shafers began calling hospitals in Aurora and emergency phone lines trying to track Wingo down. They drove around town to all the places she might have been.
“We looked and we couldn’t find her,” Cody Shafer said.
They saw her car parked outside the theater where the shooting happened, but still held out hope she was somewhere being treated.
“We’re trying to keep things together,” Marq Shafer said Sunday.
The Shafers were organizing a gathering of Wingo’s friends Sunday in Aurora to comfort each other and share memories of her. They described Wingo as a hard-working single mother who balanced work and school and raising her two daughters.
“If she put her mind to something, she was going to get it done,” Cody Shafer said. “What an example she set for her little girls.”
Wingo, an Air Force veteran, had recently started a new job as a customer relations representative at a mobile medical imaging company and was excited to shop for work clothes. She had worn a uniform in her other positions, as a waitress at a restaurant and a linguist in the Air Force, Cody Shafer said.
Her mother, Shirley Wygal, lives in Aurora and helped out with Wingo’s daughters, he said. Wygal did not immediately return calls to the AP for comment Sunday.
“They had grown past mother-daughter and were best friends,” Cody Shafer said.
Wingo and Cody Shafer had met in 2009 in an accounting class at a community college. Both single, recently out of the Air Force and new to town, they became fast friends. She called him at all hours with questions about their accounting homework and she dragged him out on the town the night he would meet his future partner, Marq.
“I don’t think Rebecca ever met a stranger,” Cody Shafer said. “Her smile would just light up a room.”
