The Red and Black

Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: News

Marie Bruce

Media Credit: FRIEND PHOTO Marie Bruce, Tom Tanner and Ben Teague [Click to enlarge]

Neighbors remember Marie Bruce as pleasant. The 47-year-old mother of two died Saturday afternoon after being shot multiple times at close range.

"She was very nice, polite, pleasant - just like I guess you'd describe anybody else," Emily Foshee, a neighbor for seven years, said Sunday. Bruce was "very much the extrovert," recalling Bruce's heavy involvement in the theater where she was killed.

Bruce was the president of the Athens Community Theater, where she acted and directed for nearly 20 years. She was a University School of Law graduate and worked as a family attorney with the law firm of J. Hue Henry in downtown Athens.

"Anybody who even casually knew her knew about the theater and knew about her other activities," Foshee said. "The people [in the neighborhood] she represented professionally spoke very highly of her."

Though neighbors knew little of Zinkhan, they spoke highly of the mother and wife who was often in her yard tending to her flowers and small garden.

"She was real nice," said Robert Adams, a neighbor. "She'd always smile and wave, but we always thought there was something different about [Zinkhan]."

Foshee said she often would see Bruce walking with her two children to a nearby horse pasture. When Foshee learned Bruce was a victim she said at first she "couldn't put it together."

"This is the stuff you read about that's always somewhere else," she said. "It's just not real."

"Marie Bruce was the binding force that held the Town and Gown community together," the theater's site said in a statement Sunday.

Lee Wenthe, a former advertising professor, was a close friend of Bruce's and was involved with the Town & Gown group.

"Marie's impact has been tremendous over the past 23 years," Wenthe said. "She was the star in something I directed, we've been in plays together - she has done just about everything at that theater and will be greatly, greatly missed."


- Julie Leung contributed to this article

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