'Sweet girl' mourned; Portsmouth police mum on leads

PORTSMOUTH

When she heard that her friend Meghan had been killed, Shanieque Jones immediately called her phone.

“I thought, 'It couldn’t be Meghan,’ ” Jones said.

Since then, Jones has called repeatedly.

“This is all that I have left,” she said. “I call it like every 10 minutes to hear her voice again.”

Jones was among more than 250 people who gathered outside Meghan Landowski’s house in Portsmouth’s Simonsdale neighborhood Friday night to remember her.

The 16-year-old sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School was found slain in her house Thursday.

People who knew her well joined others who only saw her in the hallways at school to pray and sing.

“It’s not something that we’re going to understand, but there’s one thing that we can’t let go of, and that’s our hope,” said Paul Culbertson, the youth group director at Pinecrest Baptist Church and coordinator of the vigil.

A girl sat on Meghan’s porch sobbing while a group of young women sang “Amazing Grace” in her front yard. Candles illuminated homemade signs and stuffed bears and rabbits on the curb.

“Did you just get off work?” Cristina Guzman, 18, asked Casey Ellis, 17.

“Yeah, I begged to get off. I needed to get my tears out,” Ellis said.

Both went to Woodrow Wilson with Meghan.

Friends said Meghan was known as someone who would come up behind them to hug them or give them a kiss on the cheek. Her shoes clicked so loudly when she walked they could always hear her coming.

“She inspired a lot of people in our school,” Ellis said. “She was a sweet girl, she always made people happy.”

Meghan got out of school early Thursday after an exam. She chatted with her next-door neighbor about school around 11:20 a.m.

“She seemed fine,” Andrea Warren, who lent the Woodrow Wilson High School sophomore a package of macaroni and cheese for lunch, recalled earlier Friday.

It was about 4 p.m. Thursday when Meghan’s stepfather returned to the family’s home and found her lifeless body. He called 911. Paramedics pronounced her dead. Police say it’s a homicide.

Portsmouth police released scant details about the case and would not reveal anything about the scene in the house. As of late Friday, police also announced no arrests and would not say how she died. Neither would the medical examiner’s office, which referred requests for information about her cause of death to the police. A police spokeswoman on Friday did not respond to several phone messages.

Investigators remained on the scene Friday.

The night before, police and Naval Criminal Investigative Service authorities picked up a man in Norfolk. The man, who is in the Navy, was questioned and released, said Susan Melow, a public affairs officer with the Military Sealift Fleet Support Command.

Friday marked outpourings of grief over the death of a girl described as friendly and a typical teen. On a MySpace page that seems to rain small hearts, Meghan, 16, who listed her nickname as “Mini,” described herself as being interested in “guys, fashion and dance.”

Classmates and neighbors were bewildered, wondering who killed her.

Warren and her husband, Rob, said they were stunned by what happened. They said Meghan’s family seemed close-knit.

“She’s just an average teenage girl,” Rob Warren said. “She liked to fix our daughter’s hair, put it in ponytails for her.”

On MySpace, Meghan said she didn’t watch television much. When she did, it was to see “American Idol” or “America’s Next Top Model,” she wrote.

Under a listing for personal heroes, she wrote: “My friends that are always there for me!”

Some of those friends had already begun to post notes in her memory.

“R.I.P Lil Meghan,” one wrote. “We will all love and miss u.”

Moments of silence opened the day at Wilson High on Friday morning. During announcements, Principal Timothy Johnson encouraged teachers to allow students to meet with counselors.

Kathy Saunders, a secretary at Wilson, said staff and students alike felt the pain. “We all knew her. We’re all sad,” she said.

At times, students hugged each other and sobbed. Senior Sami McConnell and a couple of his friends recalled their schoolmate as innocent. They say she smiled all the time and had many friends.

Many students wore T-shirts bearing Meghan’s name and picture, McConnell said. Out of fear, some students who usually walk home accepted rides from classmates Friday. Senior Jessica Miller said she gave several friends a lift in the wake of the apparent crime.

The senselessness of it all “makes you think it could have been anybody,” McConnell said.

Ashley Peacock, who lives across the street from Meghan, said the two of them told others they were cousins. Friday, armed with a digital camera, Ashley, 15, went to Wilson to take pictures of endearments she and Meghan had carved in the paint in various girls’ bathrooms in the school.

“We used to write like 'best friends for life’,” she said.

Staff writer Steve Stone contributed to this story.

Matthew Roy, (757) 446-2540, matthew.roy@pilotonline.com

Cheryl Ross, (757) 446-2442, cheryl.ross@pilotonline.com

Patrick Wilson, (757) 446-2957, patrick.wilson@pilotonline.com