American Was in Egypt to Celebrate Her Birthday

Las Vegas native Kristina Miller took time out from celebrating her 27th birthday in Egypt to call her father, telling him that she loved him.

Hours later, she was dead, killed along with her boyfriend in the bombings Saturday at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik.

“She was telling me about all the gifts she was bringing everyone, how she was going to spend her birthday that Friday going horseback riding and then going out to dinner with her boyfriend,” Tony Miller said Monday. “I told her I loved her, she said she loved me and that she’d call me the next day. That was the last time I heard from her.”

The elder Miller was on the late-night shift in Fareham, England, where he works for a sports betting firm, when the news broke of an explosion in Sharm el Sheik.

He frantically tried to reach his daughter and her boyfriend, Keri Davies, dialing their cellphones and hotel for hours.

“It was horrible,” he said. “I knew something was wrong. My best hope was that they were hurt and unconscious.”

Frantic for answers, he flew to Egypt, only to be told by U.S. Embassy officials Monday that his daughter had been confirmed dead.

Davies’ parents confirmed that they were informed that their son, whose 29th birthday was a few days earlier, was also killed.

“We knew he had been missing and hadn’t heard from him, and we feared the worst,” his father, Steven, said in Fareham. “But hearing the news still rips something out of you,” he told the Portsmouth News.

Miller said his daughter, a cheerleader who graduated with an associate’s degree in business at Irvine Valley College in Orange County, joined him at his firm in January. There she met Davies, a fellow worker.

Miller said FBI officials would perform an autopsy on his daughter’s body in Dover, Del., and he was making arrangements for her funeral in Las Vegas for later this week.

“I just never thought in a million years that Kristi would be gone,” he said.