Washington woman found dead in Haiti
Their daughter, Molly Hightower, was killed in the collapse of a building at a Port-au-Prince orphanage where she had been volunteering.
Her uncle, Craig Hightower, said a search crew from Virginia called Molly's parents Friday morning and told them she had been found dead. She was inside the building that collapsed in the quake.
Hightower, 22, had been providing physical therapy to handicapped children at the Friends of the Orphans.
She went to Haiti in June as a volunteer on a year-long program to work with disabled children. The Father Wasson Center, the building she worked at and lived in, collapsed during the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake earlier this week. The Red Cross estimates 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed.
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"Molly was a beautiful young lady," her uncle said. "She had a great smile and clearly had a massive capacity for love and a big heart."
Hightower went to Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma and majored in French at the University of Portland.
One of her college classmates was in Haiti visiting Hightower when the quake hit.
"It felt like the floor tipped completely and I didn't know what was going on," said Rachel Prusynski. "I remember hitting the ground, being under something, and realizing I was trapped."
Prusynski, who was on the seventh floor of the building when it collapsed, believes Hightower was in her room on the fifth floor.
Molly kept a blog about her experiences in Haiti called "525,600 Minutes" and wrote about the joys and challenges of her volunteer work.
"We went to bless the babies that died in the hospital the night before, which I've never done before. It was devastating to see them be unwrapped, cleaned, blessed and rewrapped to be buried," she wrote in December.
At a Mass for Molly Hightower on Friday morning, her uncle said the young woman didn't take the easy road in life.
"It would have been very easy for her to stay at home, or just simply to go on to grad school, or simply to go into the work force," he said. "But the one thing she knew how to do was how to love. ... This is who she was and this is who she wanted to be. ... And her family stood by her and rejoiced."
Jim Fish, the campus minister at Bellarmine, said, "She was a very typical high school kid in so many ways and yet there was a depth to her - her faith was so important, it just kept growing all the way through here, and she embraced that."
Hightower's uncle said her parents are still in shock.
"They're keeping together," he said. "They loved her dearly."
At Friday morning's Mass, Craig Hightower said, "This morning they lifted up my niece, and she was not there. She was with her heavenly God, residing with the angels in Heaven, and she was watching out over us."
