TORONTO -- Just an hour before Jessica Ghawi was murdered in the shooting at a Colorado movie theatre, she was chatting with her boyfriend about gun violence in Toronto.
"Someone had been shot Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday here. We were talking over Skype about how horrible it was," Ghawi's boyfriend, 22-year-old Jay Meloff, said in his Toronto home on Friday.
Meloff is still in shock after Ghawi and 12 others were killed in the bloodbath at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie in Aurora, just outside of Denver.
Ghawi, 24, originally from Texas, was with a friend at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises when the gunfire broke out.
She was shot in the leg and head.
Ghawi was in Toronto just last month, when she was caught in the crossfire of another shooting.
She was visiting Meloff, and the pair narrowly escaped the barrage of gunfire that broke out June 2 in the food court of the downtown Eaton Centre mall, leaving the area mere moments before two people were shot dead and five were wounded.
"She wrote about it on her blog, and she just couldn't believe she'd been so close to something like that," Meloff said, his voice trembling.
Meloff, a local junior hockey player, met Ghawi, an aspiring sports broadcaster, when she interviewed him over Skype for an article she was writing almost a year ago.
"We spent more time talking rather than interviewing. She was just so funny and witty, she didn't miss a beat," he said.
He said they were inseparable ever since, talking every day, almost all day.
"She once said to me, 'I bet you can't not talk to me for a day!' We made it two days, that was it. I couldn't stand not talking to her," he said.
Meloff moved in with Ghawi in Denver, and they lived together for a few months before he returned to Toronto to train for the summer, planning to go back to Colorado in the fall.
"We wanted our future together," he said.
Ghawi left Toronto last Saturday after spending a week enjoying the city.
"We went to Wonderland (theme park) and I rode a roller coaster for the first time. The day before the Eaton Centre shooting, we watched a sports game at a bar downtown, and she pointed at the big TV screen and said, "One day I'm gonna be on there," he said.
Meloff says Ghawi would always cheer louder than anyone else at his games, and would wave a home-made sign at him from the stands.
He still keeps it, folded up, in his wallet.
Right before her death, the couple was planning to start a charity that provides sports equipment to kids in need in the Colorado area. Meloff said he still plans to do that, and perhaps name the charity after his late girlfriend.
"She was just so giving, talented and amazing. She was beyond anything I could have ever imagined having," he said.
He said he is still processing her death and is furious about the way she lost her life.
"It's just senseless and wrong. It has got to stop," he said.
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