Friends React To Southern Adventist Student's Murder

Friends and Faculty are mourning the loss of a Southern Adventist University student killed halfway across the world.

Kirsten Wolcott was on a student mission project in the Sate of Yap in Micronesia when she was murdered earlier this week. Her friends at Southern Adventist University say Wolcott loved to teach and that's exactly what she was doing in Yap when she was killed.

On Wednesday Kirsten Wolcott went for a run on the remote island of Yap in Micronesia, but she never returned. Initial reports state her body was found in the woods after she'd been stabbed to death.

"I couldn't believe it because she was my friend first of all and i've never had a friend be murdered and it could have been me so easily," Hanna Freire, Wolcott's friend, says.

That's because Freire served as a missionary in Yap last year.

"It was like I was taken out of my life there and she was placed in it," Freire says. "I can see my students faces as they found her and it's really hard I still have not comprehended how I feel about this."

Freire tells us Wolcott was always sweet, caring, loved God, and loved to help others.

"We are bleeding as a church, as a school family we've lost one of our own," Chaplain Brennon Kirstein says.

Kirstein says Southern Adventist University is offering counseling for students right now. He tells us the University currently has eighty-six other missionaries across the globe who are serving just like Wolcott.

"And she laid her life down for a much higher cause and we salute her and we're incredibly proud of her and may others follow her example," Kirstein says.

It's an example her friends say stood out nearly half way across the world.

"She loved being a student missionary and so many people will get scared away because of the whole student missions because of this story but Kirsten would want them to go," Wolcott says.

We have learned that an arrest has been made in connection with Wolcott's death but right now details are very limited.

The University has set up a web page in Wolcott's memory. To visit the page please click on the "Southern Adventist University - Kirsten Wolcott" under the links portion of this story.