Killed: The funeral for Columbia medical student Daniella Moffson, 21, was held in New York on Friday
Hundreds of mourners gathered for an outdoor service in New York City to say goodbye to a Columbia University student killed in a crash in Honduras.
Daniella Moffson, 21, and her friends, Olivia Varley Erhardt, 20, and Abigail Flanagan, 45, were killed Wednesday when their bus veered off a steep cliff in Honduras while en route to the airport to fly home.
The three traveled to Honduras as part of Columbia University's Medical Brigade Program.
The New York Daily News reports that Moffson's father gave a eulogy Friday at the service.
He said she was giving and beautiful and went on the trip as a reward for her school efforts.
Family friend Adena Berkowitz tells the newspaper Moffson was a special young woman.
A dozen more Americans were injured in the crash, which investigators say was caused by a mechanical failure.
The bus fell at least 260 feet into a ravine when it crashed, officials said.
'This terrible and tragic loss is all the greater because these individuals were dedicating their passion and very special talents to serving those in need,' Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger wrote in an email to students Wednesday night.
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Scene: This photo shows the bus on its side between the town of San Juancito and the capital city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, following the crash on Wednesday January 13, 2016
'No endeavor more proudly exemplifies the traditions and values of our university.'
Columbia College sophomore Erhardt, Barnard College junior Moffson and Flanagan, a nurse practitioner at Columbia University Medical Center, were volunteering for the Columbia chapter of U.S.-based Global Brigades, which organizes international health and development missions. Barnard is a women-only college affiliated with Columbia University.
The volunteers brought medical supplies and took patients' vitals as they shadowed doctors and helped in a pharmacy in underserved communities.
One of Flanagan's two sons, a 19-year-old, was also volunteering with the group and was with his mother when the bus crashed but is OK, said Lisa Schachter, her longtime friend and fellow nurse practitioner.
An unidentified woman is loaded into an ambulance after the bus flipped on its side along the highway between the town of San Juancito and the capital city of Tegucigalpa in Honduras this week
'From a professional perspective, Abby was an expert clinician, and she was a role model to students,' she said Thursday.
'From a personal perspective, Abby really symbolized that true spirit of being a great friend. She was always the person to go to.'
Teachers at The Ramaz School, a modern Orthodox Jewish day school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, remembered Moffson as a special student who believed in volunteerism, spending her time in high school at various hospitals' pediatric units and then serving in a home that serves abused and abandoned children during a year abroad in Israel.
'I have to tell you, of all the students I've ever taught, this kid was as wonderful a human being as you could possibly have,' said Michael Lupinacci, who taught her algebra.
'She really put other people before herself all the time and that's the way she lived her life.'
Three people died after their bus crashed while taking them to the airport to fly home after a volunteer mission
Twelve more Americans were injured but are in a stable condition, according to the hospital's administration
Erhardt, of Cincinnati, Ohio, was a high-performing student who was as talented on the stage as she was on the volleyball court but never came off as boastful or brash, said Jim Renner, her principal at Mariemont High School.
'She was just a star among stars down here,' he said. 'But she never tried to throw her weight around. She was quiet and unassuming.'
Dr. Marc Rothenberg, director of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, wrote in an email to colleagues that Erhardt was a standout student in his lab last summer.
'She was a very kind, appreciative and distinguished young lady,' he told them. 'Her death is very untimely and sad to me.'
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