Lisa Spoelstra will never forget the day, as a first-grader in Marysville, that she met Kate Donahue.
Outside for recess at Kellogg Marsh Elementary School, she saw a girl with curly brown hair standing by herself.
“Something pulled me over to her,” the 25-year-old Spoelstra said Wednesday. After quick schoolgirl introductions, “we were just inseparable,” she said.
“She moved to different places — to Arizona at 14, and then she went to college in California before she moved back up,” said Spoelstra, who now lives in Los Angeles. “We’ve never really been separated. We always talked on the phone. We visited each other several times a year.”
This July 17, Spoelstra was to have been maid of honor in the wedding of her dearest friend to Jesus Sanchez Vasquez at Seattle’s Space Needle. Donahue, also 25, met the Boeing mechanical engineer last June at Chopstix, a piano bar on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.
“They were truly amazing together,” Spoelstra said. “I’ve been with her through every boyfriend she ever had. There was never one I really approved of — until Jesus. He was just the perfect match for her.”
Their wedding will never happen. An unspeakable tragedy in Puerto Rico over the New Year’s holiday claimed the lives of Donahue and her fiance.
Sanchez Vasquez, 28, died Jan. 4 after an attack in which police say a man, the uncle of Donahue’s fiance, used kerosene and a propane tank to burn more than a dozen guests at a dinner party. Donahue, who was flown to Miami for treatment of extensive burns, died Jan. 6.
Except for Donahue, all the victims were members of the suspect’s family. According to news reports, at least three others died in the attack.
“Our energy is to remember Katie, not the awfulness that happened,” said Patrice Lee Moore, Donahue’s aunt and the sister of Kate Donahue’s mother.
The family is here from California for a funeral service for Donahue at 11 a.m. today at Alderwood Community Church. It will be followed by a joint celebration of the lives of Donahue and Sanchez Vasquez at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, also at Alderwood Community Church.
“Our biggest joy is that the last six months of her life she was as happy as she’d ever been,” said Donahue’s mother, Michelle Donahue of Walnut Creek, Calif. “The two of them made each other better. I didn’t believe in love at first sight, or in a one-and-only. But something about Kate and Jesus made all those magical things true.”
Kate Donahue is also survived by her father and Michelle’s husband Tom Donahue, by her younger brother Keenan Donahue; and by many loving relatives, friends and co-workers.
Michelle Donahue said that her daughter worked as a licensed vocational nurse at Group Health’s Capitol Hill Campus in Seattle. “Her hope was to be an R.N.,” said Donahue, also a nurse. Ultimately, she said, her daughter’s aim was to attend the University of Washington to become a nurse practitioner.
Donahue said that since moving back to the Northwest last February, her daughter had lived on lower Queen Anne Hill in Seattle and “loved the urban life.”
Kate Donahue spent much of her childhood in Snohomish County.
“I think she was about 4 when we first moved here,” Michelle Donahue said. Kate was born May 20, 1985, in San Bernadino, Calif. Tom Donahue moved his family to the Seattle area to work for the Boeing Co., Moore said.
Michelle Donahue said Kate started school at Marysville’s Kellogg Marsh, where she met Lisa Spoelstra. The Donahues built a house near Kayak Point, and she went to Twin City Elementary. “Then we realized we weren’t country folk, so we moved into Arlington and she went to Post Middle School in Arlington,” Michelle Donahue said.
Kate spent her freshman year at Arlington High School before the family moved to Chandler, Ariz. She graduated in 2003 from Valley Christian High School in Arizona.
Spoelstra was with the Donahue family in the intensive burn unit of Jackson Memorial Hospital when Kate Donahue died.
Her memories take her back to childhood when Spoelstra’s father would take the girls hiking and camping. More recently, Spoelstra said, “I was there when she tried on her wedding dress for us. She was simply beautiful in every way.”
“It breaks my heart,” said Moore, Kate’s aunt, who remembers that her niece loved watching “The Wizard of Oz” as a little girl.
Michelle Donahue said the family spent Christmas together with Kate and Jesus in Seattle. In Puerto Rico, after receiving the horrific call about the fire, she said friends and kin of Sanchez Vasquez took the Donahues under their wings to help with translation and to offer comfort. “They were supposed to be our family,” said Donahue, adding that she does not talk about the legal case against the suspect.
“We talked to her as she breathed her last,” Donahue said. “Truly, she was surrounded by family and friends. We have the hope that we will all be together someday.
“She wasn’t just a statistic. She wasn’t another unhappy story,” Donahue said. “Katie meant something to a lot of people. Our goal is that these fine people are remembered for a very long time.”
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
Services planned
A funeral service for Kate Donahue is scheduled for 11 a.m. today at Alderwood Community Church, 3403 Alderwood Mall Blvd., Lynnwood. A celebration of the lives of Kate Donahue and her fiance Jesus Sanchez Vasquez is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Saturday at Alderwood Community Church.
Contributions may be made to Wells Fargo Bank, No. 6174877891 for the couple. Funds not used for medical and funeral expenses will go toward starting a foundation in their honor.
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