Silver Taps: Caroline St. Clair Killian

From being a Fish Camp counselor to the Delta Gamma vice president of communication and interacting with every person she could in between, Caroline St. Clair Killian greeted every stranger she met with a warm welcome and a loving smile.


“She had a vibrant and contagious personality that she shared with everyone she met,” Tarryn Glenn, management junior and close friend to Caroline, said. “You could meet her for five minutes and be her best friend. You felt like you really knew her.”


Tarryn met Caroline in Fish Camp and the two became inseparable after they went through sorority recruitment together. Tarryn said while most of their time spent together was split between spontaneous sleepovers and delirium-inducing study parties, Caroline always found a way to make the most of any situation she was in and would bring infectious laughter and happiness to whoever she was with.


“Her thing was to make people laugh,” Tarryn said. “If she could make you laugh then she was happy. I laughed 24/7, all the time with her. She knew that there was always something she could do to make someone smile and that is what she was about at all times making people smile and making them feel special.”

Psychology senior Anna Mussleman was another close friend to Caroline and said that Caroline was a perfect example of a caring Aggie who loved people and would pour her heart into making everyone and anyone feel at home.

“The Aggie Spirit is definitely something that she carried so near and dear to her heart,” Mussleman said. “One thing that she said helped her decide to go to A&M was the people here and that when she was on campus people would talk to her and ask how she was doing and that was something she always did as well. She’d walk up to anybody and ask how they were doing and then make them laugh with some super weird and probably kind of inappropriate joke and make them feel like they were on top of the world. She wanted to make sure that everyone felt loved even if it was a stranger on campus.”

Anna and Tarryn said some of their favorite memories of Caroline were from the everyday moments they would spend together, like getting ‘Pitty Pizookies’ when any of them were feeling down, watching Taylor Swift goat videos for hours or studying together with breaks of laughter in between.

After Caroline’s accident, a GoFundMe page was established to bring Tarryn back to the United States for the funeral.

Tarryn said that even in the midst of the uncertainty over whether or not she would make it home, she found hope and good news in the form of Killian’s favorite food, green grapes, at a dinner with her friend, who had set up the GoFundMe page.

“A plate of Tapas came out and there were two huge green grapes on them and green grapes were her favorite thing ever,” Tarryn said. “Then Annie looked at me and said ‘The GoFundMe is at $3,000 now you’re going home’ and at that moment I felt [Caroline] there with me calming me down and saying ‘They’re here for you. This family is incredible, the Aggie Family,’ and just seeing the green grapes and hearing [Annie] say that I just felt her there with me.”

Tarryn and Anna said the friendship that they shared with Killian was beyond comparison and that Killian impacted their lives throughout their friendship and continues to do so even now.

“She was always happy,” Tarryn said. “For me, I know I can never be her but to honor her I guess I want to always be happy and say yes to everything. She never said no, she always took life as it came and did everything to the best of her ability and went with it and always had a smile on her face throughout every situation.”

Article published in The Battalion