Remembering Nine-Year-Old Grace Bettie: A “Role Model for Everyone”

Her family and community members from all over the F-M area held a candlelight vigil in her honor

GLYNDON, Minn. — A community comes together for a candlelight vigil to support the family of nine–year–old Grace Bettie.

She drowned in the swimming pond at Buffalo River State Park last week.

KVRR’s Danielle Church has more on those remembering the impact Grace had on not only the F–M community, but all those around her.

Nine–year–old Grace Bettie had many hopes and dreams.

Her biggest was to become a doctor someday and give back to those who don’t have anything at all.

“You can make a goal and you can say yeah, I want to be a doctor. But you might not have the skills to get there. But she did. She was one of those kids, all those kids out there who make a goal and take those steps to get to that goal. She could have done that,” said Joni Lordeman, Grace’s teacher at Ellen Hopkins Elementary in Moorhead.

Part of those skills included setting an example for all those around her.

“She’s a role model. I think we should all be more like Grace: working, learning and being happy everyday. Being a good friend,” Lordeman said.

Being the kind of person you could lean on, a best friend, is why it makes it all the more hard to say goodbye to a one–of–a–kind soul.

“I felt hurt, sad. I know her family was her too,” said Ashlyn Klee, Grace’s best friend. “Losing a friend is terrible and it was the first time I lost a friend and I never imagined that would happen to me and to her.”

Because not only was Grace the type of person who how to be a good friend, she knew how to push others to be better versions of themselves.

“She teaches me a lot like how to make new friends and start new conversations, but me being the first one to start them,” Klee said.

“I think people that know her and people that connect with her, I think we all have to be better people. We have to listen, we have to learn, we have to make good goals. That would be the lesson that Grace would want us to have. Anybody who didn’t know her lost knowing a great person,” Lordeman said.

Bettie’s family has set up memorial accounts at both Wells Fargo and on a GoFundMe page account under the name “Grace Elizabeth Bettie”.

Her funeral will be on August 24 and 25 in Minneapolis.