What Jack Frengs wants people to know about his wife, Patricia, is very simple.
"It's played down, or put down sometime, but she was a good wife, she was a good mother, she was a good daughter, she was a good sister, she was a friend to anybody who needed one. I don't know if there are more important qualities than that," Frengs said.Patricia Frengs, 55, was shot and killed at the LDS Family History Library Thursday. Doctors say she died instantly from the bullet fired at her during Sergei Babarin's rampage that morning.
News of the shooting reached Jack Frengs through a co-worker a little before noon. A bank examiner from San Francisco, he had come to Salt Lake City on business. His wife of 35 years had joined him on the trip to do some research on their family history, even though she hated to fly.
Frengs spent most of Thursday looking for Patricia -- wondering if she was among those hurt. He wandered around Abravanel Hall watching and waiting. He talked topolice and left them his name and the name of his hotel. He watched news reports filled with eyewitness accounts and, later, information on Babarin.
For most of the day, he knew more about the shooting and the shooter than he did about his wife's condition.
"I didn't assume anything at the time," said Frengs, 59. "But as the day went on and I wasn't finding her . . . well, when the music stops, some people are sitting and some people are standing and I was standing."
Jack Frengs met his future wife through her sister, who set them up on a double date. Meeting her at her parents' home, he liked her right away. She was pretty and nice.
"I thought, this is something worth continuing," he said.
Less than a year later, they were married. Later there were three children, Daniel, 34, Patrick, 32, and Maureen, 25. Daniel and Maureen are both married. Patrick, who has a learning disability, lives at home.
"We had a good marriage," Frengs said. "Our personalities worked well off each other."
When facing a problem, Patricia Frengs would track backward to the root of the things and analyze it, figuring out how it arose. Jack, on the other hand, would move right toward finding a solution.
"That's good," he said. "You need that in a marriage."
In the five days since the shooting, pieces of that marriage have come rushing back to Frengs.
"It's come in bursts of laughter and in bursts of tears. Sometimes at the same time, sometimes on the heels of one another," he said. "It's pretty bizarre. It's like winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning. I mean, how could this happen?"
How could it happen to a woman who cared lovingly for her father in the months before his death, who stitched her daughter-in-law's wedding dress and had been active at church. A woman who spent hours in the garden tending vegetable plants and talking to her daisies and roses.
"I don't know what I'll do now," Frengs said. "All those things that were Jack and Pat are now not. The next vacation . . . all the things that we thought that we'd be doing, and now we're not."
It will be in his children -- the children that have their mother's same interest in people, in knowing what makes them tick and what makes them happy -- that Jack Frengs will find comfort.
"I can't imagine not having them around," he said.
The children came quickly to Salt Lake City after the shooting. Jack reached Daniel over a cell phone at his job in San Francisco. Daniel called his sister, who was in a car on her way home to San Jose after an evening out. Patrick was on the telephone for what seemed like hours before his father was able to reach him.
By Friday morning, the family was together. And together they walked through the library to see where Patricia Frengs had died.
This Friday, surrounded by friends, neighbors and co-workers, the Frengs family will remember their wife and mother in a memorial service at the Church of Christ in Pleasant Hill.
"The kids have been talking about it," Jack Frengs said, adding that he doesn't know if he'll speak at the funeral.
"I don't know if I can. Even now, when I've gone back to the scene and I can see it in my mind, I keep thinking this didn't happen. It couldn't."