By TIM PERONE
A suburban Chicago high school senior described as 'an angel' was killed just days before graduation when she was struck by lightning while writing in the park. Jennie Dizon, 17, who planned on studying theater in the fall at the University of Cincinnati and traveling to Europe this summer, was found in O'Brien Park in Downers Grove. Dizon, an honor student who was a member of her school's color guard, had just dropped her two younger siblings at the dentist's on Thursday afternoon and went to the park to write in her journal, one of her favorite hobbies.
'She didn't answer her phone,' sister Emmeline Dizon told the Chicago Tribune. 'We just kept calling and calling and she didn't answer.' Emmeline and her brother Michael, 14, saw police in the park, just across from their two-story brick house, as they walked home from the dentist. But they didn't find out until later what had happened to their sister. 'They say you go through the stages of grief,' Emmeline said. 'I felt like I went through all of it at the same time. Now it's all coming around again and I'm in a stage of denial.' Jennie's deeply religious mother, Marietta Dizon, said: 'Jennie is our angel. She has a golden heart. Whoever has met her, she has surely touched your heart.
'I think God had called her. We just have to place our whole trust in him.' Her father could not help but think of all the things he would not get to do with his daughter. 'I was looking forward to our father-daughter dance at the cotillion,' Eric Dizon said. 'She was supposed to graduate this Sunday. She graduated from life, I guess.' Jennie's body was discovered about 5:20 p.m. by a police officer patrolling the park. An ambulance was called but it was too late. An autopsy conducted on Friday confirmed she was killed by a lightning strike.
Officials at Benet Academy, a Catholic school where Jennie attended school with Emmeline, 16, offered their condolences to her family. expressed their heartbreak in an online statement. 'Though she was taken from us much too soon, we trust that she is now in God's loving embrace,' the school said in a statement. One of her friends from a Catholic youth group remembered Jennie as a loving, friendly spirit.
'She loved everyone, and there was never any chance of her hiding it,' said Arielle Joaquin, 22. 'She looks exactly the way that she is on the inside. You could see the love that she had in all that she did.'
