I wont be home tonight, she texted her brod

Ruby Jade Ruba, at 20, surprisingly did not have a night life.

“She buried her head in her studies “was how her brother Ritchie described the only girl and middle of three children of Vicente and Margie Ruba, who are natives of Macrohon, Southern Leyte.

But on the night of Wednesday, March 5, Ruby texted her brother Ritchie that she would not be home for the night

The reason was still in line with the kind of girl Ruby was — she and her classmates would stay up to finish a project that was required for their graduation on March 30.

Ritchie had no inkling that Ruby would not be coming home forever.

Two men on a motorcycle, for want of her cellphone, gunned Ruby down in cold blood, just outside a dorm of a classmate where she and another classmate had gone to borrow an adoptor for the laptop computer they were using for their project.

Ruby finished high school at the top 10 of her class at the Saint Joseph College in Macrohon and was an officer of the school’s Supreme Student Council.

Vicente, who said his children were brought up to be God-fearing, is active in the Couples for Christ with his wife, an activity that rubbed off on Ruby who also immersed herself in a church-based youth organization in her hometown.

Ruby never misses Mass on Sundays and, with graduation fast approaching, would not wait for Sundays but go whenever she had the time. Her favorite church is the Santo Rosario Church.

Vicente, who works with the Coast Guard in Cebu, recalled Ruby as being “ paraygon ” who would sometimes sit on the lap of her parents whenever there was something that she needed.

Vicente, because of his work here, stays with Ruby and Ritchie in Cebu. Margie is left in Macrohon with the youngest child.

The body of Ruby was supposed to have been taken back to Macrohon last night but the family gave in to the insistent request of her classmates to allow the body to stay one more night with them here in Cebu.

A week before she was killed, Ruby apparently had a premonition of what will happen when, on receiving her copy of her graduation picture, she refused an offer by her father to buy a frame to mount it in, saying not just yet as graduation day was still a few days away and she feared it might not come to be.

With that, she put her picture back inside the brown envelope that it came with.

Come March 30, some 500 nursing seniors at Cebu Doctors University will receive their diploma, capping years of study that would have prepared them for the life ahead of them.

Ruby will not be one of them. (Edwin Ian Melecio/JST)