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“See you Thursday.”
Those were the last words Robert Olds remembers his 25-year-old niece saying before her life was cut short in the Boulder King Soopers slaughter on Monday.
Rikki Olds was on shift as an assistant front-line manager when she was gunned down along with nine others — several of them coworkers.
“Rikki was truly special to us. She was vibrant, she was bubbly,” her uncle, Robert, recalled at a press conference Wednesday. “Rikki was kind of the light of our family.”
He said the young outdoors enthusiast was looking forward to celebrating her grandmother’s just-passed birthday later in the week.
“She had made plans to come over Thursday to hang out, celebrate my mom,” Robert said.
“My parents raised her for the most part. My mom essentially lost a daughter and a granddaughter,” he added.
“See you Thursday” was the last thing she told him, he added.
Rikki, of Lafayette, loved dyeing her hair and getting tattoos — and had a one-of-a-kind laugh, Robert said.
“She’d start laughing so hard, she’d snort,” Robert recalled with a chuckle, pausing to look up as if speaking to his late niece. “She’d probably throw something at me for telling you guys that.”
But she was also known as a go-getter at the King Soopers supermarket, where she was “moving up the ladder,” the heartbroken uncle said.
“Rikki was living a dream of being a store manager,” he said.
Rikki was among the youngest of the 10 victims, who ranged in age from 20 to 65.
Noting her young age, Robert said he was “saddened that she didn’t get to experience motherhood, she didn’t get to experience marriage.”
Asked how he and his family move on from a tragedy of this scale, Robert said he’d do his best to honor Rikki’s memory.
“There’s a hole in our family that won’t be filled,” he said.
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