Deora Bodley
20 years old
San Diego, CA
A student at Santa Clara University.
[The following is excerpted from an article in the New Jersey Union Tribune.]
Ms. Bodley was born in San Diego and had attended La Jolla Country Day School. She was about to begin her junior year at the Santa Clara University.
"She was just a bright light," said her mother, Deborah Borza of San Diego, an employee with Copley Information Services in La Jolla. "She was a kind and generous person. She was fiercely independent and a leader. She was the future of the country."
While in San Diego, Ms. Bodley volunteered with the Helen Woodward Animal Center. She also was active in TRACE -- Teens Respond to AIDS with Caring and Education -- a peer education program in which teens talked to fellow high school students about sexually transmitted diseases.
At Santa Clara University, where Ms. Bodley was majoring in psychology and French, she was active in America Reads, in which she helped tutor children in reading at a Santa Clara elementary school.
"She made a difference everywhere she went," her mother said.
In addition to her mother, survivors include her father, Derrill Bodley of Stockton, CA; a 10-year-old sister, Murial; her grandparents, Pat and Francis Guerra of Foxfire, NC; a great-grandmother, Jean Guerra of Elyria, Ohio; her 28-year-old step-sister Eva Rupp of Washington, DC; and Nancy Mangum-Bodley, her step-mother who lives in Stockton with Deora's father.
The family suggested donations to the Helen Woodward Animal Center, 6461 El Apajo Road, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067; TRACE, in care of La Jolla Country Day School community service program, 9490 Genesee Ave., La Jolla, CA 92037; or America Reads.
For the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's biography of Deora Bodley, click here.
