BAGHDAD — She hugged and laughed her way through war zones with an effervescence belying her seriousness of purpose.
No pass to get through a checkpoint? She leaned across her Iraqi driver to show the stern American guard the shock of blond hair beneath her flowing black robes.
"Please, please, please, please, please," she said, and then, "Where are you from?"
Injured Iraqi -- An article in Monday's Section A about the death of activist Marla Ruzicka said Rakan Hassan of Mosul was shot by a helicopter gunship. He was shot by a U.S. patrol.
She waved aside tough-looking guards from all corners of the world, never looking back to see if they had raised an AK-47 in her direction. In her one-woman mission to make the United States take responsibility for the innocent victims of its wars, 28-year-old Marla Ruzicka bubbled with a passion that seemed to lift her beyond danger.
Iraq's random violence caught up with Ruzicka on Saturday. Her car pulled alongside a convoy of U.S. contractors just as a suicide bomber detonated his car. Ruzicka, her driver-translator and one guard on the convoy were killed. Five other people were wounded.
Her death stunned a wide circle of diplomats, government officials, soldiers, journalists and ordinary people from Baghdad to Kabul.
"God bless her pure soul, she was trying to help us," said Haj Natheer Bashir, the brother-in-law of an Iraqi teenager Ruzicka was trying to evacuate to the Bay Area for surgery. "She was just a kind lady."
A former Marine who now works for the State Department in Baghdad said: "She was a remarkable woman and a kind person, and she affected everyone she came in contact with." The diplomat said he was not authorized to speak on the record about Ruzicka because her remains were awaiting DNA analysis for positive identification.
Ruzicka was en route to visit an injured Iraqi girl, her group's website said. But it wasn't clear why she was on the notoriously dangerous Baghdad airport road, or why her car pulled up alongside a convoy. Almost all Baghdad drivers slam on their brakes as soon as they see a row of slow-moving SUVs ahead to avoid getting in the way of possible car bombs.
Raised in conservative Lakeport, north of San Francisco, the 5-foot-3 Ruzicka was a high school basketball star, a leading three-point shooter. She also showed an early attraction to humanitarian causes.
Ruzicka and her twin brother, Mark, were the youngest of six children of Clifford and Nancy Ruzicka. Mark, who gathered with family and friends at their parents' home in Lakeport on Sunday, said his sister had led a school protest against the Persian Gulf War in 1991 when she was in eighth grade, and was promptly suspended.
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