A Touching Recollection from her Vigil

It was nice to see Laurie and mine's shared stories of Teresa's life recorded anonymously in the Stranger's article this week:

On July 23, a Thursday, a stream of people dropped by the low black fence in front of Teresa Butz's house to leave flowers and pay their respects. They were on their way to an early evening memorial on the lawn in front of the South Park Community Center, just around the corner from the house. Loretta's was shut down; the bartenders and kitchen staff wanted to attend. Police were finished collecting evidence inside the home, but they kept up a visible presence around South Park and near the house. A loud, vacuumlike noise could be heard coming from inside its walls. Lettering on a white truck out front suggested the source: "Puroclean, the paramedics of property damage."
Over at the community center, a couple hundred people gathered in the bronze light of the predusk hours to remember Butz. In the crowd there was fear about the suspect, still on the loose, and an undercurrent of tension. When a black man is being hunted by the cops for assaulting two white lesbians inside a home that one of them bought recently in a slowly gentrifying but often ignored neighborhood, it triggers a lot of normally unspoken feelings.
But above all, there was a profound sadness and a desire to celebrate an irrepressible do-gooder who had been a warm and feisty presence in many lives. Speaking through a rickety microphone-and-podium setup provided by the community center, a friend said that in St. Louis, where Butz's large family is from and where her remains were ultimately sent, there had been a line out the door at the wake.
Here, on the community-center lawn, were all types of people, a preponderance of them women: lesbian couples holding each other in grief, volunteers from the Seattle Women's Chorus singing mournfully to start things off, two women in UPS uniforms, tough softball players from the team on which Butz played third base, Seattle council member Sally Clark.
A US Airways jet passed low overhead, muting everything for a moment.
Diana Ramirez, the 14-year-old who was the first to help the victims the night of the murder, stood up to speak, escorted by her father. "I wasn't the only one out there trying to save her," Ramirez said. "But I did as much as I could. To the man who did that—he must have no heart."
She seemed unsteady, hounded by grief and survivor's guilt. A woman seated on the grass in front of her shouted: "You're a hero."
People spoke of Butz's strong sense of right and wrong, and her dogged pursuit of the right. How she tracked down someone who had stolen her purse, immediately calling her credit-card companies to find out where the latest charge had come from, then putting down the phone and rushing from her downtown Seattle office over to Westlake Mall, scouring stores until she came upon the thief carrying her purse, grabbing her, and shouting: "Stop, I'm making a citizen's arrest!"
Everyone on the lawn laughed at this.
The friend recounting the story continued: "This skinny little lady is like dragging Teresa out, but Teresa is holding on and not letting go." Butz got her purse back, and her credit cards.
Another friend recalled that when Butz's partner, a musician, played a show in Bellingham earlier this year, "After each song, the very first thing you could hear was Teresa's voice going, 'Woo-hoo. Yeah!'"
Some spoke of their friend as T., or T-Butz, or T-Buzz. The previous night, the softball team—filled with people who called her T-Buzz—had worn black armbands to its game. "We really tried to win the game for her," one of the players said. "But we didn't. We got 10-runned and the game had to end early. We gave it our all."
A woman with impaired vision spoke of how Butz read to her and how the two came to love talking trash to each other about rival Major League Baseball teams. "She will be missed for a long, long time," she said.
Others rose:
"The very first time I met Teresa, she hugged me like she'd known me for 10 years. She squeezed me like we were best friends."
"If you didn't know her, you missed out."
"Someone like this doesn't deserve it. No one deserves it. But she was a great person."

May she rest in peace knowing how much her life positively affected her friends, family and complete strangers.