Abinta Kabir left her family’s home in Bangladesh to meet up with two friends around 9 p.m. Friday. Minutes later, she placed her last phone call, a cousin posted on Facebook.
“After 10 minutes we received a call of her yelling about gunshots and grenades,” Hazera Afiya posted. “My Uncles, aunts and grandparents rushed to the scene.”
Family members searched local hospitals, praying Kabir had made it out of Holey Artisan, which had become the latest scene of a terrorist attack. It wasn't until 2 p.m. Saturday that Kabir's family learned she was one of 20 dead. Her friend and classmate at Emory University's Oxford College, Faraaz Hossain, was also killed.
“She was the heart and soul of her family and was taken from us in a second,” Afiya wrote. “I hope you rest in peace beautiful.”
Abinta was a rising sophomore at Emory University’s Oxford College, about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta. She loved basketball and cheered on her hometown Miami Heat. Faraaz had just completed his second year at the Oxford campus and was headed to Emory’s business school in the fall. Both were born in Bangladesh and were childhood friends long before college, and both had traveled to their native country to visit family.
Back in Georgia, word spread quickly through social media, a classmate said Sunday.
“The hardest thing for me is knowing how scared they must’ve been,” Kereisha Harrell said. “They were two of the best people I’ve ever known, and they didn’t deserve to die that way. No one there did.”
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