Selena Gomez pays emotional tribute to Christina Grimmie

“Her brother is a hero”, Orlando Police Department public information officer Wanda Miglio said during an earlier press briefing this morning.

The two apparently had no personal connection to one another until Friday night when police said Loibl traveled 100 miles from his home in St. Petersburg to an Orlando concert venue.

“She was incredibly talented and she sang from her heart”, said 17-year-old Kaitlin Martin, a fan, who was waiting outside Orlando’s The Plaza Live concert venue Friday night when she heard loud “pops” coming from inside.

The gunman fatally shot himself during the struggle with Marcus Grimmie and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

Love how the OneRepublic cover shows off her piano skills.

Police say the suspect had two guns.

Grimmie was transported to a local hospital, where she later died from critical injuries, police said.

He added that police were now searching through the Loibl’s phone and computer to find a possible motive for the murder. They credited the singer’s brother with preventing the gunman from hurting others. People are not patted down. “They open their bags and authorities look inside those bags for weapons”, Mina said.

But past bouts of even more extreme gun violence, including the 2012 killing of 20 school children at an elementary school in CT, have led to little change in a country where the right to bear arms is protected under the second amendment of the U.S. constitution. Grimmie started out in her teens as a YouTube singer, eventually gaining more than 2 million subscribers.

“There are no words. We lost a handsome soul w/ an fantastic voice”, the NBC talent show wrote on Twitter.

“My heart is absolutely broken”.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2014 that Grimmie moved to Los Angeles in 2012 after joining Selena Gomez on tour to focus on her singing career. She included a picture of herself and Grimmie, who was her friend and sometimes backup singer.

And her stepfather Brian Teefey set up a GoFundMe page to help Christina’s family with the page raising over $20,000 in just a few hours. “I wanted to write with feeling and emotion”. I learned this business through the eyes of a father and Christina was like a second daughter to me.

He further said, “She was my baby sister”.