FOX 21 News, KQDS-DT

FLOODWOOD - The cold, fall weather casting its shadow Friday mimicked the feeling in the room as friends and family members of Cristyna Watson gathered.

"She was always the funny one, always the outgoing one, she always had the humor," Cristyna's cousin Hannah Reiswig said.

Standing hand in hand, Cristyna's family and friends said they were willing to talk after details of her murder surfaced because being strong and trying to smile was what she would have wanted.

"She just loved life," Reiswig said.

"She was always willing to help someone with whatever they needed," Cristyna's friend Doris Ritter said.

Working as a personal care assistant, they said Cristyna was beautiful inside and out; loving animals, her boyfriend of three years and her family.

"She was always very protective over me, too," her sister Candace Watson said. "If I dated anyone, she'd check out everything she possibly could about him."

"She was very headstrong, she had goals in her life," Cristyna's cousin Siama Palkki said.

The fact that her plans to get married, buy a house and have kids would never happen was something that was hard to comprehend.

"Just seems like a dream, seems like something you'd watch on TV, one of those murder shows," Ritter said. "You never think it'd happen to someone so close to you."

"It also feels like it's coming in waves," Palkki said. "Where it's just earth–shattering and then it feels like it's just not happening and then it just starts all over."

However, the support flowing through Facebook and from the town of only a few hundred was something the family said has helped cope with the loss of a woman who had it all. 

"She was everything, she was everything," Palkki said.