Krystle Campbell
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A restaurant manager who was at the Boston Marathon’s finish line to watch a friend complete the race was identified yesterday as one of the three people killed in Monday’s bloody bomb attack.
The family of Krystle Campbell, 29, remembered her as a caring, loving woman with an electric smile.
“You couldn’t ask for a better daughter,” her mom, Patty Campbell, said yesterday at the family’s home in Medford, Mass..
“She had a heart of gold. She was always smiling.”
Campbell’s grandmother Lillian told The Post that she’d lost her “favorite” grandchild.
“It was just Thursday that we sat together having tea,” Lillian recalled. “Like always, we were laughing and having good times.”
The elder Campbell said her granddaughter, who was a manager at Summer Shack Restaurant, had helped her after a recent operation.
“She took me to the doctor’s office and back,” she said. “We were very close.”
The family’s grief was made worse when they were led to believe Krystle was alive early yesterday because she had been misidentified in the hospital as her friend Karen Rand, whose boyfriend had run the race and who was injured in the blast.
“They had Karen registered as Krystle,” her mother recalled. “We were under the impression my daughter was having surgery.”
The family learned the truth only when they were brought to a bed in the emergency-room expecting to see Krystle, but found Karen.
“They thought she was OK, but it turns out she passed on,” her grandmother said through tears.
Early this morning, another victim of the marathon bomb blast was identified by a state-run Chinese newspaper as 23-year-old Lu Lingzi, a Boston University graduate student from China who was with two friends watching the race’s finish.
A friend said he was getting a masters degree in statistics.“It’s shocking,” said a friend of Lu at BU. “She was a very friendly girl, very happy.”