Olivia King was a regular parishioner at Catholic Church of the Incarnation in Collierville, Tenn., attending a service there on Thursday morning only hours before she was killed in a mass shooting at a Kroger grocery store.
“Everyone needs to be more like Olivia,” said Maureen Fraser, the vice mayor of Collierville, who had been friends with Ms. King since they both moved to the town in the mid-1990s. “Kind, generous, caring, selfless.”
Ms. Fraser said that one Christmas season, Ms. King gave her family an envelope filled with money, knowing that Ms. Fraser’s husband was out of a job.
Ms. King’s husband died in 2005, Ms. Fraser said, and she had lived with one of her three sons and his children before they recently moved to Ohio.
“I cannot believe I am typing this,” that son, Wes King, wrote on Facebook on Thursday as he shared that the gunman had shot his mother in the chest.
Emergency responders attempted to use CPR on her to no avail, Mr. King wrote, and she died shortly after arriving at a hospital.
“I apologize for the graphic details, but this type of crime needs to stop being glossed over and sanitized,” her son wrote. “No one deserves this.”
Ms. King’s smile will never be forgotten, a neighbor, Aahil Shermohammed, said.
“She was always checking up on me for no reason,” he said, “and it was always nice when you’re having a bad day to have someone like that smile at you.”
