Nichole Birky remembered as happy, outgoing, friendly

On bright, sunny spring afternoons, Jordan Avenue is usually packed with people tossing baseballs and frisbees, walking dogs or sunning themselves on the lawns of the greek houses. But Wednesday afternoon a strange silence fell on the street, and students outdoors were not there to play.\nA group of sweatshirt-clad women huddled together in groups on the lawn of Delta Zeta sorority, eyes swollen and cheeks tear-stained, murmuring in disbelief about the loss of their sister, Nichole Birky, whom they had found dead in her bed that morning.\nThe inside of the house was empty except for a few people lingering in the hallways or picking at food arranged on a table in the dining room. The rays of sunlight that streamed through the front windows strikingly contrasted the somber mood.\n"We're still in our grieving process and our thoughts and prayers are with the Birky family," said sophomore Jessica Braman, president of Delta Zeta. "Our sister Nichole will be missed."\nBirky's friends said she was an outgoing person who was friendly to everyone she met, and they said they will miss her smile and her presence the most.\n"She loved life so much, she was so happy all the time," said junior Jessica Ploszek, who met Birky in Foster Quad their freshman year and was Birky's roommate their sophomore year before Birky joined Delta Zeta. "She loved her friends -- she had so many and liked everybody. I can't express how wonderful she was all the time. Being her roommate was one of the best times of my life."\nOne of Ploszek's fondest memories of Birky was the weekends they spent together as roommates. She said they would go out to eat -- usually for breakfast at Waffle House -- and then spend all day on Sundays curled up watching movies. \n"She was one of my best friends," she said. "(I'll miss) her smile, her presence, her always bringing me up when I was down, being around her and just being stupid with her." \nBirky, a junior from Gas City, Ind., seemed to touch everyone she was around. She was a therapeutic recreation major and was helpful to her classmates, said junior Jeff Louis, who had known Birky for about a year.\nLouis said the two became friends when they were anatomy lab partners last semester and had planned their schedules so they could be physiology lab partners this semester. He said they had planned to study together Wednesday night and said he was shocked when one of Birky's sorority sisters called him to tell him the news.\n"I had to go sit outside and think about it for a while," he said. "We were supposed to get together (Wednesday night) and I had just talked to her \n(Tuesday). Something that's here can be gone really quickly. It made me think."\nLouis said he and Birky got along so well that they often studied together and sometimes hung out at tailgates before football games. He described Birky as being honest, helpful, genuine and "very comfortable to be around."\n"When you first met her, you felt like you knew her," he said. "She wasn't fake at all. You see a lot of people a day you could talk to, but you could tell her anything. When you talked to her, you wouldn't just talk about the weather."\nSophomore Weston Pavey also loved just talking to Birky. The two met through Facebook when they realized they had the same birthday and would both be turning 21.\n"I'm not as close to her as her other friends were, but every time I talked to her I had a smile on my face," Pavey said. "We probably talked to each other on the phone every day. She was always cracking me up."\nPavey, too, said he was shocked when he heard the news.\n"It's just weird how \neverything happened," he said. "I cried. It took the second phone call I got for it to sink in. I'll miss her funny comments, her sense of humor." \nBirky worked at Steve and Barry's during her sophomore year and quickly earned the respect of her coworkers. IU sophomore and current Steve and Barry's employee Paige Vinson worked with Birky until she quit last spring. Vinson said she was always very personable with the staff and customers.\n"She was always cracking jokes with people and got along with everyone really well," Vinson said. "When I was going through the (sorority) rush process she was really encouraging and very cool about it."\nDelta Zeta is hosting a candlelight vigil tonight at 6 p.m. at the sorority house on the North Jordan extension so Birky's friends can comfort each other and remember her life together.\n"I want everybody to know that she was such a wonderful person," Ploszek said. "She was so funny and so caring. We all loved her and will miss her so much"