OYSTER BAY, (CNS) – The mother of slain journalist Marie Colvin told reporters the day after she was killed Feb. 22 in Homs, Syria, that her daughter was “totally committed to what she did.”
She knew “the importance of telling the story and writing it and getting it out to the world no matter what. That was her life,” Rosemarie Colvin said.
Marie Colvin’s body arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York March 6. On March 12, family, friends and colleagues gathered to bid farewell to the 56-year-old veteran correspondent at her funeral Mass at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in Oyster Bay, which was followed by a private interment.
Newsday quoted Father Dennis Mason telling the congregation: “We can see Jesus taking Marie by the hand and saying, ‘Blessed are you, Marie, in your hunger and your thirst for righteousness,’” and for being “a voice for the voiceless.”
She was killed when a makeshift media center in Homs was shelled. French photographer Remi Ochlik also died in the attack, which was part of the ongoing effort by Syrian forces to dislodge rebel fighters.
In its obituary, The Associated Press noted that her distinctive eye patch – she lost the sight in her left eye in a 2001 ambush in Sri Lanka – was “a testament to Marie Colvin’s courage, which took her behind the front lines of the world’s deadliest conflicts. To write about the suffering of individuals trapped in war.”
Born Jan. 12, 1956, in Astoria, Marie grew up in East Norwich and graduated in 1974 from Oyster Bay H.S. She went on to Yale University, where she planned to study anthropology but instead discovered journalism and made that her career.
For the last 25 years, she had lived in London, working as a war correspondent for Britain’s Sunday Times.