She knew him as a devoted friend, so worldly wise at 19 that the slight difference in their ages evaporated.

"What people need to know is what a kind person he was; he was full of life, full of laughter and connecting with people," she said.

But Thursday night, the new world shared by VCU students Tyler J. Binsted and his 21-year-old girlfriend turned upside down at Richmond's Byrd Park.

"They got my keys and opened the trunk of my car," Binsted's girlfriend said yesterday, her face drawn, her eyes dry as sand.

One of the two assailants had a gun. It was sometime after midnight. Hours earlier, they'd played tennis near this same spot.

"We were standing there and they told us to get in the trunk. Tyler put his hand on the lid and closed it shut. He said, 'We're not doing that.' It was an incredible act of bravery."

In the thin light of night near the tennis courts, the stand-off seemed to dissipate. The couple already had given up all they had, she said.

"We thought it was over with," Binsted's friend said. They started to walk away, then broke into a run.

But a shot rang out and Binsted, a sophomore sculpture major at Virginia Commonwealth University, fell to the ground.

His friend asked not to be identified yesterday, fearing for her safety and because Richmond police still were looking for one of the two assailants last night.

Police yesterday described him as a black male weighing about 110 pounds and 5 feet, 3 inches to 5 feet, 6 inches tall. Earlier police descriptions said he is a juvenile and goes by the name Pete.

In custody is a second person, Howard Reed Scott III, 17, of the 1500 block of Silver Avenue in South Richmond off Jefferson Davis Avenue.

In the early hours of Thursday morning, there still was more to deal with for the slender redhead, a Blacksburg resident whose life already had known death too well.

There are students at Virginia Tech and people in Blacksburg she knows whose lives were lost or deeply touched last school year, from April 16 shootings at the Blacksburg campus and in an unrelated double murder.

"I guess it's a matter of trying to move on; finding strength somehow," she said emptily. She has not slept and tries to stay in the close company of friends.

But in the early morning hours of Thursday, as she tried to flag down a car to help her dying friend, a frightening new chapter evolved.

The assailants had driven off in her car after the shooting; then her car loomed into view again and a male with a gun suddenly approached her. "I think they had come back to kill me," she said.

She ran to the rear of a second car she had stopped seconds earlier, grabbed at the back door and jumped in.

She had escaped. But the driver refused to help other than to take her away. His cell phone didn't work, he said.

She got out at Cary Street and Boulevard and ran west on Cary. A man whose name she doesn't know let her use his cell phone. Moments later, she watched an ambulance pass her on Cary, headed to Binsted.

She said she has lobbied for stiffer gun controls before the legislature and that she and Binsted spent hours talking deeply of their shared world visions and of peace.

In the home Binsted rented with friends in the Fan District, a movie poster of "Taxi Driver" shows Robert De Niro posing with two handguns. But another wall bears the picture of an old man praying over bread. It's called "Grace."

"Those were the two extremes of Tyler's life," said roommate Erik Young. "He wanted to know everything. He read voraciously. He wanted to understand the world, the good and bad."

Binsted played drums in a band called Pilgrims and Strangers. Books on yoga and by authors as varied as Khalil Gibran and Cormac McCarthy sit on a bedside table.

But mostly, his girlfriend said, "he was a guy who wanted to do what he could to help people; to bring joy to their lives. He loved making people happy. I was always the one who wanted to help create a political system that works.

"Now I want to live in a place where there are no guns."

She talked about her studies last summer at Oxford University in England. "In England, there are no guns," she said.

A funeral for Binsted is scheduled Monday near his hometown of Mount Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. His twin brother is flying home from studies in Europe. An older sister is flying home from out West.

His father, Thomas Binsted, a Marine and formerly a logger and ranch hand in Montana, said yesterday he is trying to understand how such a thing could happen to a family that sought the quiet and stillness of the Shenandoah Valley.

The family has asked that contributions be made to the SPCA in Woodstock or to the music department of Stonewall Jackson High School. There will be a memorial service Sunday at the school, where Binsted was a soccer star, highly regarded student and violin virtuoso.

The funeral Monday at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Jerome begins at 11 a.m., with burial to follow in the church graveyard.

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.