A Throng Bids Farewell : Crime: Slain Cal State Fullerton honor student Cathy Torrez is eulogized as 1,200 mourners crowd into her funeral rites at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Placentia.

PLACENTIA —  Slain Cal State Fullerton honor student Cathy Torrez was eulogized by her priest Friday as a “bright example of someone learning to be the human being she was created to be.”

About 1,200 mourners crowded into St. Joseph Catholic Church to remember Torrez, 20, whose body was found stabbed and stuffed in the trunk of her car last weekend after she had been missing a week. The funeral was followed by a mile-long procession to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Orange, where Torrez was buried.

“Her disappearance and death has touched something in our hearts,” Father Fergus Clarke told the mourners during the funeral mass. Many were students and teachers from Cal State Fullerton and Valencia High School, across the street from the church, where Torrez graduated in 1991 and had recently worked as a bilingual aide. She also worked as a checker at Sav-On Drug Store, the job she was coming home from when she disappeared.

“The city of Placentia waited with you,” Clarke said to Torrez’s family. “We worried with you, prayed with you and prayed for you. . . . Her disappearance and death has brought us together as a city in a way we may have forgotten was possible.”

The family wept quietly in the front row of the church, near Torrez’s closed coffin, which was draped with a white cloth. At the head of coffin was a lit candle and a wooden cross.

Torrez recently had been honored as one of Cal State Fullerton’s top sociology students. A Placentia native, she had been attending the university’s various workshops for promising women and Latino scholars since the eighth grade. She planned to be a social worker or a juvenile probation officer.

“She had a love for knowledge and excelled as a student,” said the Rev. Nicholas Saucedo of the Placentia Nazarene Church, where some members of Torrez’s family attend. “She loved her Mexican heritage and wanted to help her people. . . . God gave us a good person in Cathy Torrez.”

Father David Baumann of the Episcopal Church of the Blessed Sacrament, who was a regular customer of Torrez’s at Sav-On, read an open letter to Torrez’s still-unknown killer, and pleaded with the attacker to surrender.

“You have robbed the world of a precious and gifted person and you denied her the possibility of serving the world in her chosen profession, of marriage and having children,” Baumann said. “You shall live in fear, looking over your shoulder to see if you have been found out. . . . You should take courage and admit what you have done and submit to earthly judgment and heavenly forgiveness. By your act of violence you have destroyed only yourself.”

Placentia police spokeswoman Corrine Loomis said Friday that six detectives continue to work full time on Torrez’s killing and are investigating several leads. Because it is unlikely she would have stopped her car for a stranger, Police Chief Manuel Ortega has speculated her killer was likely an acquaintance.

Torrez disappeared at 8 p.m. Feb. 12 after leaving from Sav-On, at Bradford Avenue and Yorba Linda Boulevard. Torrez, who had telephoned her mother minutes before and said she was coming straight home, was last seen turning south on Bradford Avenue in her burgundy Toyota Corolla. She lived one mile away.

Her body was found inside the car last Saturday in the parking lot of Placentia Linda Community Hospital. The car had been parked there since at least Feb. 14, witnesses told police.

“We need to speak to anyone who saw the vehicle or Cathy between Feb. 12 and” last Saturday, Loomis said. “Anyone who saw anything is urged to come forward.”

Rewards now total $25,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer. Detectives can be reached at (714) 993-8164 or (714) 993-8146.