Dozens of police scoured the area for evidence and are tracking down hundreds of leads. So far, no arrests have been made, no suspects have been identified, no motive has emerged and despite a thorough search of the bearing  area, no weapon has been found.

 

“I don’t want this to be in vain,” said McKinney, 24. “I want this to send a message. I want everybody to just love each other a little more. That’s what she always wanted. She always wanted everyone to just be good to each other.”

 

McGill was walking her dog on a trail along the Spokane River near the 1800 block of East South Riverton Avenue when a man jumped out of the bushes and stabbed her in the chest multiple times. McGill staggered up the embankment, screaming for help. Her daughter and a neighbor came to her side just before she lost consciousness.

 

“She passed in my arms,” McKinney said. “I am forever, forever blessed and grateful that I could be there with her. She couldn’t say anything to me, but I told her that I loved her and that I was there with her and that she wasn’t alone.”

 

McGill, who moved to Spokane from the Wenatchee area about a year ago, was stabbed multiple times in her upper body around 8 a.m. in the residential area. The Spokane County Medical Examiner said Friday her official cause of death was multiple stab wounds. The manner of death: homicide.

 

McKinney said Friday that her mother, who worked for Costco for 13 years, was a free spirit, a happy woman whom many people admired.

 

“She was everybody’s mom,” McKinney said. “She was a lot of people’s inspiration, a lot of people’s strength. Happy all the time. Laughed every day. Made everybody smile.”

Her neighbors at the Riverpark Apartments, where McGill and McKinney moved about a week ago, milled around a makeshift memorial Friday, trying in vain to make sense of the brutal slaying. One neighbor constructed a cross McGill bearing name, and several others placed candles and flowers at its foot and prayed.

 

Meanwhile, in a news conference Friday afternoon, Spokane Police Department interim Chief Scott Stephens said detectives are following every possible angle to find and apprehend McGill’s killer.

 

“The random nature of this crime is very troubling,” Stephens said. “That doesn’t mean people need to lock themselves up in their bearings houses and not leave.” But, he said, people should be vigilant and report any suspicious behavior they see.