Sitting beside the brave Wellingtonian are those who loved Rrie most – childhood best friend Savana Sasa, 24, who saw Rrie just hours before she died, flatmates Esi Sasa, 23, and Sammie Brown, 25, and family friend Nonnie Brown, 22.The tight-knit group was almost inseparable, and is desperately struggling to accept that the ‘big sister’ they loved so much is gone forever.
‘It all feels so weird. I was supposed to pick her up from the airport a few days later,’ says Reza from the Lower Hutt home she shared with her only sister.
‘The first thing I thought when the police told me was, “It’s not true. You’ve got the wrong person.” I don’t think any of us believe she’s gone yet.’
Reza continues, ‘It had always been the two of us together. We’re not that close with our parents and we had never lived apart.’
Thinking back on their childhoods, Reza remembers idolising her sister.
‘I was the annoying little sister following her around. I even tried to go into her classroom on the first day of school,’ she says.
Rrie, who worked in the credit department at Kiwibank, was undeniably gorgeous, but Reza wants people to know she was more than a beautiful face.
‘She loved animals, gaming, anime, photography and pranking. She was always playing jokes on people,’ says debt collections associate Reza.
‘She was really intelligent and reliable. I think she would want people to remember that because she always valued smarts before looks. She was just lucky to have both.’
Now, says Reza, the thought of a future without Rrie feels ‘impossible’. ‘Her main goal was for us to buy our own home where we felt safe. That’s all she wanted for me, to be safe.’
While Rrie was fiercely independent, Reza believes underneath it all she wanted to find love and settle down.
‘I think she wanted to get married one day, but she was very independent.’
Reza had mixed emotions when she farewelled Rrie before her two-week holiday to the Gold Coast, where she was attending her friend Hayley Ison’s wedding.
Rrie was excited to see her friend, head to Dream World and go shopping, but Reza couldn’t help but feel sad, knowing it would be the longest time the sisters had ever spent apart.
Poignantly, the last words they said to each other in person were ‘I love you’. After Rrie left, they kept in touch daily – and she demanded her little sister send regular photos and updates about her beloved cat, who Reza was looking after.
But on the night of Rrie’s death, neither her sister nor their friends had any idea what the evening would bring – not even Brisbane-based Savana, who spent the day shopping and sightseeing in Surfer’s Paradise with Rrie and saw her just hours before her death.
‘She dropped me at the train station that afternoon [Thursday, August 7],’ Savana says. ‘She didn’t like hugs so I just said, “I’ll see you Saturday,” because we had planned to meet up again.’
But by 2.20am on Friday morning, Rrie was dead. Now, three weeks on, Reza still isn’t back at work and is slowly making her way through the stages of grief.
Looking back, she often wishes she’d had the chance to say more to Rrie. ‘Of course I was proud of her, but we never spoke very emotionally with each other. I keep thinking she will call me and say, “Where are you? You’re supposed to be picking me up from the airport,”’ says Reza.
Taking a deep breath, she continues, ‘I actually don’t understand it because she wanted to come home and we had plans to do all this other stuff.
‘We’re supposed to be old enough to understand death but I just don’t understand this.’
