Miranda Faith

Miranda was a child who lived in full color. She loved baseball — not just watching it, but the whole world around it: the dirt, the cheering, the crack of the bat. She loved animals with the kind of reverence only small children have, treating every creature as worthy of gentleness. She loved school, soaking up every new thing with wide eyes and a readiness that made the adults around her smile. And she loved dress-up — stepping into costumes and characters with the seriousness and delight of someone who understood that imagination is its own kind of truth.

She was observant in the way that quiet children often are. Miranda noticed things — the shift in a room's mood, the way someone's voice changed, the details that most people overlooked. She watched the world carefully, and what she saw, she absorbed. She carried a kind of knowing that went deeper than language, an awareness that made her presence feel larger than her small frame.

There was a sweetness to Miranda that everyone who knew her remembers. She was the child who gave hugs without being asked, who shared without being told, who found a way to make the people around her feel seen. Her kindness wasn't performed — it was simply who she was, as natural as breathing.

She played hard. She ran and climbed and threw herself into every game with her whole body. She laughed with the kind of abandon that only comes from feeling safe inside a moment. Her play was full-throated and joyful, the kind that leaves grass stains on knees and tangles in hair and the echo of laughter in a room long after it's gone quiet.

Miranda was her mother's shadow. She followed Kris everywhere — not out of fear, but out of love so complete it didn't know how to keep its distance. She was independent, too, in that paradox of early childhood where a child is both fiercely attached and fiercely herself. She was beautiful, with the kind of beauty that comes from being fully alive. And she was brave, in ways that a three-year-old should never have to be.

Miranda's life was cut short by violence, but her legacy refuses to be defined by how she died. The Miranda Faith Memorial Foundation was built from the love her mother carries and the promise that Miranda's light would not go out. Through scholarships, advocacy, and education, her name has become a doorway — one that leads survivors out of darkness and into the future Miranda never got to have. She lived for three years. She has been changing lives ever since.