The hourlong service included no reference to 33-year-old Christopher Watts, the husband and father charged in the killings.
Police said he killed his 34-year-old pregnant wife and their daughters, 4-year-old Bella and 3-year-old Celeste, inside the family’s suburban Denver home then dumped their bodies on his former employer’s property.
Family Wants Justice
During the funeral at a Catholic church, Father John Forbes read comments aloud from Shanann Watts’s father, mother, and brother.Watts is from North Carolina; the couple moved to Colorado shortly after they married about six years ago.
“You are nothing but pure love, always caring for everyone,” her father, Frank Rzucek, wrote. “You will always be daddy’s little girl.”
“Mom, Nonna, loves you with all her soul,” she wrote.Forbes said the victim’s mother, Sandra Onorati Rzucek, described Shanann as a “fireball” and asked God to “give all our love” to her daughter and grandchildren.
Forbes said Shanann Watts’s family would like to see good come from the tragedy, including a law that would recognize the lives of unborn children such as their grandson.
“They do not desire vengeance and death, but justice and life,” Forbes said.
Bodies Found
A friend asked police on Aug. 13 to check on Shanann Watts and her children after she could not reach them via text or phone.Police searched the family’s home in Frederick and found Shanann Watts’s purse and phone still there.
Chris Watts remains in a Colorado jail without bail and has not yet entered a plea. During interviews with television stations before his arrest, he spoke about missing his family.
Prosecutors have said the girls’ bodies had been submerged for days inside a tank holding crude oil and their mother was buried in a shallow grave.
Prosecutors, though, charged him with killing all three family members.
