BOSTON (AP) – Even with Imette St. Guillen’s violent death, mourners on Saturday couldn’t hold back a smile, and even an occasional laugh, as they remembered her infectious smile and bold confidence, her love of board games and penchant for high heels.

“Since this is the last time I will speak to you publicly, I will not speak about your childhood,” said her mother, Maureen St. Guillen, eliciting a roll of laughter through a crowd that overflowed into a funeral home parking lot.

Then her mother paused, and tears started.

“You were and are the love of my life,” Maureen St. Guillen said, quivering. “When I need to speak to you it will be private. I will go into my heart, where you will always be.”

The body of the 24-year-old graduate student was found dumped in Brooklyn on the side of a service road last week.

Someone accosted St. Guillen sometime after she left The Falls bar in Manhattan at 4 a.m. on Feb. 25. She was raped, strangled and suffocated with packaging tape that was wrapped around her entire face.

Police said they have no suspects. A $42,000 reward has been offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

On Saturday, two dozen Boston police motorcycles were parked outside the William Gormley Funeral Home in the city’s West Roxbury neighborhood. Across the street was a phalanx of television cameras and photographers.

Inside were St. Guillen’s old friends from Boston Latin High School, her college classmates from George Washington University in Washington D.C. and her new peers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, where she was on the dean’s list and months away from a master’s degree.

Photographs in the funeral home showed how St. Guillen lived. In one, she’s surrounded by a crush of friends. Another shows her hugging two dogs. In a third, she poses – flashing that smile – next to a rushing river.

Rebecca Reilly, her roommate for the last two years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said St. Guillen had a plaque in the apartment that read: “Live each day as if life has just begun.”

“That is just what she did, and what she would want us to do,” Reilly said.

They recalled her love of game nights, when she would dominate friends in board games, especially the word game Taboo. They remembered how St. Guillen always had a sense for her friend’s emotional well-being and knew just when to call. They said she never hesitated to tell people that she loved them.

St. Guillen wrote in her high school yearbook that she wanted the strength of her mother, the intelligence of her sister and the heart of her father, who died in 1990, but wanted to be her own person.

Friends said she fulfilled that, and much more.

“I can’t say goodbye to you,” said her sister, Alejandra St. Guillen. “I just can’t find the words. I will be saying goodbye to you for the rest of my life.”

AP-ES-03-04-06 1433EST

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