Oregon mall shooting victim Cindy Yuille was ‘everybody’s friend’
When Jacob Tyler Roberts, 22, stormed into the Clackamas Town Center mall outside Portland, Ore., with an assault rifle, his targets would be random, unconnected, caught in his line of fire.
Cindy Ann Yuille was one of them.
Yuille, 54, was shot and killed in the Tuesday afternoon attack. She was a mother, a devoted nurse and a Southern California native. In a statement released Wednesday, her family called her “everybody’s friend” and “a wonderful person who was very caring and put others first.”
Yuille also knew intimately the anguish and sorrow that comes with death: She was a hospice nurse, as is her husband, Robert Yuille.
“Cindy was a beloved caregiver for the kind and compassionate support she provided for patients and families at times of impending loss and need,” Kaiser Permanente spokesman Dave Northfield said in a statement. She had been with Kaiser, where her husband also works, for 16 years.
Familiarity with death was no shield for the grief brought by Tuesday’s tragedy.
“I’m gonna miss her,” one of her co-workers, Marcella Brady, told the Los Angeles Times. “She had a way of engaging with people and inviting all different kinds of people in, no matter what.”
Brady recalled a trip she’d taken to Fiji with the Yuilles and how Cindy Yuille wound up sitting in an airplane seat away from her travel companions. By the time the plane landed, Yuille had gotten herself and her friends invited to a three-day Hindi wedding on Fiji.
“She was an amazing woman,” Brady said.
Yuille was an athlete and an outdoorswoman, and her 5k and 10k race times still dot the Web. Brady said Yuille was also a skier and a hiker.
The Yuille family requested privacy but granted an interview to the Oregonian at the family’s home in southeast Portland.
“A few years ago they were hiking Mt. Rainier when Robert tripped and broke his leg,” the Oregonian wrote. “An avid jogger who ran every morning with her white German shepherd Jack, Cindy ran for miles to find her husband medical aid -- and then ran miles back up the trail to where he lay, waiting.”
Cindy Yuille graduated from San Diego State University, the newspaper said, and was a native of Southern California. She is survived by daughter Jenna Passalacqua, 23, and a 13-year-old stepson, Hunter Yuille.
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