Friend of slain Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton: I don’t know how to cope

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Friends who witnessed the random gunning down of a 15-year-old Chicago girl less than a week after she performed at President Obama’s inauguration continue to grapple with the senseless loss of the prep school honors student.

“She was honestly like the happiest person I know and I don’t know, like, how to cope with this because it shouldn’t have been her,” an emotional Klyn Jones said of her friend, Hadiya Pendleton. “It shouldn’t have been anyone but especially not her.”

Pendleton was killed Tuesday afternoon in a quiet south-side neighborhood less than a mile from Obama’s Chicago home. She was huddling with Jones and other friends under a canopy to escape the rain when an unidentified gunman came at them, opened fire, and then escaped the scene in a car.

“We were all running because we heard the gunshots and then she stopped and she was like, ‘I think I got shot.’ And I was like, ‘Hadiya, please stop joking,’” Jones said. “She was like, ‘No seriously, Klyn, I think I got shot’ and she just fell. And then time just like started moving in slow motion.”

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