200 mourners gather to honor KSU freshman

Victoria Hunt’s mother, Joanne Slease, held a small, silver angel with the word “strength” inscribed on the back of it.

She said she found it while cleaning Hunt’s room a few days ago.

Rubbing the small angel and standing with tears in her eyes, Slease spoke to a crowd of more than 200 people who gathered to remember Hunt, who died in a car accident last Sunday. Hunt, 18, was a freshman fashion design and merchandising major at Kent State.

Family and friends came together for a celebration of life ceremony yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Wooster. They talked about their favorite memories of Hunt.

The entrance of the church was decorated with posters covered with hundreds of photos of Hunt with her two brothers and friends. There were even photos from the Kent State-Akron football game, which Hunt attended the day before she died.

“If I had known that was going to be her last night, I never would have let that night end,” said Tyrone Wright, one of Hunt’s friends who was with her at the game.

Slease talked about how Hunt loved to laugh and take pictures. She loved cheese and beef jerky. She loved going to movies and cutting hair.

“She’d want us to laugh and remember all the good times we had with her,” Slease said.

She also talked about how Hunt was still trying to find herself. Slease said Hunt was starting to become “interested in tattoos and piercings.” The first time Hunt got her ears pierced was in the sixth grade. She described all of Hunt’s tattoos, noting her backpiece that centered around the word “overcome.”

“She would want us to overcome all of the difficult things – like now,” Slease said.

Hunt wanted another tattoo with lines from Hebrews 13:5, Slease said.

“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you,” she read from the passage.

Slease shared her last memory of her daughter as well. She said she picked up Hunt from Koonce Hall the Friday before she died. They did each other’s hair, and then they went to see The Guardian.

“I think she probably taught me a lot more than I probably taught her,” Slease said.

Contact student politics reporter Kali Price at [email protected].