Nine-year-old Antonia Candelaria, who died along with six other children when Monday’s twister tore through the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, was due to be buried at a local church.

Her funeral is the first of three due to be held in the next two days for children who drowned at Plaza Towers, which was directly hit by the storm.

In total, 24 people were killed and as many as 13,000 homes damaged or destroyed.

“She was a beautiful young lady on the inside and out,” said an obituary for Antonia published in The Oklahoman newspaper. “She had her own most special and beautiful way of looking at the world. She could find the positive, good and joy in everything.”

Read the rest of the story here. 

Betsayda Hernandez: “I think I’m going to lose my legs.”

The 40-year-old packing house worker was in her driveway, about to run an errand, when a town car crashed into her.

Her father shows how she was trapped between the door. The car was up against the neighbor’s tree.

“What happened what happened? I started screaming, but everything happened so fast.”

She says she asked the people who hit her for help, but they ran away. A neighbor called 9-1-1, while Hernandez was stuck, in tremendous pain. “Never stopped. Every minute it would go high, high. It was terrible.”

Fresno Fire Captain Chad Tucker was called in to help organize a technical rescue; the chain around the tree first stabilized the car from rolling. “Because she was kind of underneath the car, we needed to lift it and move it a special way, and so that’s what these air bags allowed us to do.”

Airbags, the jaws of life, and special cutters freed Hernandez in less than 30 minutes.

“I was praying in the car. Thank God everything was good.”

She believes it’s a miracle she’s still here, and thanks the firefighters for saving her.

Tucker says knowing she’s OK means everything. “To see the minimal injuries that she had, it’s pretty rewarding.”

“I keep going over it. I see him coming at me. That feeling I had,” said Cervantes.

The nursing student was sitting in a common area with her friend when she was approached by 20-year-old Dylan Quick, a man accused of stabbing more than a dozen people at the college campus, who made a fast motion at her neck.

“I thought he punched me at first,” said Cervantes.

Moments later, the California native’s shirt was covered in blood and she watched in horror as someone she now recognizes as Quick moved from victim to victim.

“It seemed like it was a game to him,” she said. Quick was tackled less than a minute later by several students.

Cervantes has six stitches in her neck and is plagued by visions of the traumatic event, but vows she will return to school.

“I just don’t know what it will be like being in that building again, on that campus again,” said Cervantes.

The Marquez-Greene family released a statement saying that in her short life, Ana strengthened them with her loving, generous and joyful spirit, and it is with immeasurable grief that they mourn her loss.

“She routinely committed selfless acts of kindness: every drawing or craft project she began was envisioned not for her own enjoyment, but as a gift for another,” said her parents. “She often left sweet notes that read, ‘I love you Mom and Dad,’ under our bedroom pillow – not on special occasions, but, rather, on ordinary days.”

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Their home is also quieter as music seemed to trail after Ana wherever she went. Marquez says Ana had a gift for music, taking after her father – saxophonist Jimmy Greene.

“Ana’s love for singing was evident before she was even able to talk,” said her family in a statement. “…And she never walked anywhere – her mode of transportation was dance. She danced from room to room and place to place. She danced to all the music she heard, whether in air or in her head.”

Marquez says Ana also loved to read the Bible and loved to sing and dance as acts of worship.

RELATED: [VIDEO] “She was an angel” – Relatives of 6-year-old shooting victim

“We ask that you pray for the legions of people who are left behind to cherish memories of her,” says Marquez on behalf of the whole Marquez Family. “We also ask that you, like Ana, commit selfless acts of kindness to all those around you. Maybe, in some way, through love, similar senseless acts of violence could be prevented.”

One example would be to go out and kiss someone.

“She would not allow me to kiss her goodbye,” says Ana’s mother. “Instead, when I bent down to kiss her, she would take a step backwards, poke out her lips and wait for me to lower my cheek – she made it clear that she wanted to do the kissing.”

RELATED: Father of shooting victim: “Ana beat us all to paradise, I love you sweetie girl”

Funeral arrangements are yet to be announced. In lieu of gifts and flowers, the family is working to establish scholarships in Ana’s name at Western Connecticut State University’s Department of Music in Danbury, Conn. and the Artist’s Collective in Hartford, Conn.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

The girl’s grandmother, Elba Marquez, said the family moved to Connecticut just two months ago, drawn from Canada, in part, by Sandy Hook’s sterling reputation. The grandmother’s brother, Jorge Marquez, is mayor of a Puerto Rican town and said the child’s 9-year-old brother also was at the school but escaped safely.

Elba Marquez had just visited the new home over Thanksgiving and is perplexed by what happened. “What happened does not match up with the place where they live,” she said.

A video spreading across the Internet shows a confident Ana hitting every note as she sings “Come, Thou Almighty King.” She flashes a big grin and waves to the camera when she’s done.

Jorge Marquez confirmed the girl’s father is saxophonist Jimmy Greene, who wrote on Facebook that he was trying to “work through this nightmare.”

“As much as she’s needed here and missed by her mother, brother and me, Ana beat us all to paradise,” he wrote. “I love you sweetie girl.”

Her family spoke out on Sunday, telling TODAY’s Erica Hill about Soto’s dedication to the children at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Conn.

“She didn’t call them her students,” sister Carlee Soto, 20, told TODAY. “She called them her kids.”

James Wiltsie, Soto’s cousin and a Fairfield County police officer, said the family was told that Soto died trying to save the lives of her students. “She was found protecting her kids,” he said, “Doing instinctively what she knew to do.”

Read more on TODAY.com

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A victim of domestic abuse during her first marriage, Rivera used her perspective to publicize the issue through her advocacy.  In 2010, she was named a celebrity spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) against battered women and domestic violence in Los Angeles.  To further commemorate her dedication to battered women, the L.A. City Council officially named August 6th  “Jenni Rivera Day.” Rivera had also founded a charitable organization – the Jenni Rivera Love Foundation – which offered supportive services to single mothers and victims of both domestic and sexual abuse.

Known for using her music as a vehicle to make public her own struggles – becoming pregnant while in high school, battling her ex-husband José Trinidad Marín in court over issues of sexual abuse , for which he was eventually sent to prison, and facing the bitter drama following the end of her parent’s 40-year marriage – Rivera was outspoken about being a woman in a male-dominated, Latino culture.

“I wasn’t allowed to have dolls,” she told Dallas News of her childhood growing up in Long Beach, California among four brothers.  “My mom bought them for me, but they would tear them apart and get rid of them. They wanted to teach me karate and doing pop-wheelies in the street and playing baseball and playing marbles and being a great wrestler. It kind of made me tough. I got in trouble if I got into a fight and I came back crying,” Rivera  said.

The social media aficionada was also outspoken being expanding her commercial appeal beyond the music industry. With a clothing, makeup and fragrance line, as well as production credits on two shows starring her daughter Janney Marin – “Chiquis & Raq-C” and “Chiquis ‘n Control” – Rivera was intent on growing her empire.

“I’m going to be the Mexican Oprah Winfrey and the Mexican Howard Stern as well,” she told the Houston Chronicle in 2010. “I’m going to do radio and TV. I really, really like to talk and get my point across. And I like to listen to my crowd and to my fans.”

With more than 15 million album sales to her credit, Rivera often used her style of Mexican norteña and banda music to publicize her personal struggles. Songs like 2011’s “La Gran Senora” addressed her mother’s struggle against her father’s infidelity, while the lyrics of her classic hit “Juro Que Nunca Volvere” were about being vulnerable to love – something she knew all too well with three failed marriages.

And Rivera was all too aware of Latinos being vulnerable to laws like Arizona’s SB1070 law, joining the movement as an outspoken immigrant rights activist.

”It doesn’t respect humanity and it’s racist,” said the mother of five at a 2010 rally in Arizona. The recent two-time Mexican Billboard Award winner took to the streets in protest of the law because she shared the indignation of those “who have been targeted by this hateful law that views any Mexican American [sic] or anyone with brown skin as ‘reasonably suspicious,’” according to a press release announcing her involvement with the anti-SB 1070 movement.

Rivera – who told PARADE magazine in August that she was nearly three quarters finished with her autobiography – was also outspoken about issues ranging from education (despite her first pregnancy as a sophomore in high school, she graduated and later went to college to earn her degree in business administration before working in real estate), health (she had a cancerous tumor removed from her breast in 2011), LGBT equality (she performed at the Billboard Awards for Mexican music dressed in purple to show solidarity) and gender equality.

It was this last issue for which she may remembered most, telling reporters at her final press conference following her Dec. 8 concert in Monterrey that “I am a woman like any other and ugly things happen to me like any other women.”

“The number of times I have fallen down is the number of times I have gotten up.”

“I just kind of hollered to some folks around and said, ‘Hey, let’s get this car up at the count of three,’” the Aurora Police Department officer recalled on Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the auto-pedestrian crash at Exposition and Abilene in Aurora.

Three seconds later, part of the Kia Rio was up in the air. That’s when Aurora Sgt. Jon Kessler found himself scurrying underneath to help rescue little Angela Kalala, 2, and her mother Kapinga Muanza Kalala, 37.

Kalala was trying to cross a relatively busy road when she and her three children were hit on Monday evening. Police say the driver of the Kia was not at fault. Kalala’s twin boys were not significantly injured, but both she and her daughter remain hospitalized as of Tuesday afternoon.

Among the bystanders who assisted officers that evening was Richard Chan.

“The mom was unconscious. She was leaning over. The girl was trying to get out but her leg was trapped under her mom’s chest. Her mom was pinned to the ground,” Chan said.

Chan and several others lifted the vehicle alongside police and helped pull the mother and toddler to safety.