On Friday April 25^th, a student at Jonathan Law High School in Connecticut was stabbed to death by a fellow classmate.

Sixteen-year-old Maren Sanchez was a junior at the high school. She died on the day of her junior prom.

It is said that sixteen-year-old Chris Plaskon, a fellow classmate of Sanchez’s, asked her to be his date to the junior prom, she declined. That’s when the violence started. Plaskon pushed Sanchez down the stairs and stabbed her in the neck with a kitchen knife he brought from home. Friends of the pair witnessed the attack.

“She was screaming,” said one friend, who was in the building at the time of the attack. “There were students in the hallway when it happened.  The kids who saw it are all a wreck.”

Plaskon was cuffed by a school resource officer while police were on their way.

Emergency workers found Sanchez bleeding in the stairwell and rushed her to Bridgeport Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

“The unprovoked attack on Maren this morning has unfortunately, for our family, resulted in the permanent loss of Maren Victoria Sanchez: a bright light, full of hopes and dreams, with the future at her fingertips,” Sanchez’s cousin, Edward Kovac, told reporters Friday afternoon. “Maren should be celebrating at her prom this evening with her friends and classmates. Instead, we are mourning her death, and we are trying as a community to understand this senseless loss of life.”

That evening all of Sanchez’s friends, dressed and ready for prom, went to a nearby beach to mourn her death. About 200 friends went to Walnut Beach that evening. The Hartford Courant, the local paper, reported that ‘tears were flowing freely’ as friends remembered Sanchez through stories and anecdotes. They held up her green prom dress, meant to keep the memory of their lost school mate alive. They crowned her prom queen . Several kids tweeted after the vigil. Some said “Jonathan Law’s Prom Queen of 2014”. To end the night, the group released purple balloons into the sky with the words ‘Love you, Maren’ written on them.

Maren Sanchez was a part of the school’s drama club and was expected to perform in a show next weekend.