East Windsor Mourns Wormstedt at Funeral

Rose Zaugg said at the funeral service of 15-year-old Brooke Wormstedt at St. Catherine Church in Broad Brook Friday that she could talk all day about her niece.

But Zaugg said that Wormstedt, who along with Vernon resident Matthew Masse died in a car accident on May 25, “[t]here are not words beautiful enough to describe Brooke.”

“You would walk into a room and I would feel better, no matter what was going on,” Zaugg said of Brooke, an East Windsor High sophomore. “Thank you for letting me be a part of your life.”

Zaugg described a girl who looked beautiful on the day of the prom, teased her cousins and uncles until they got “riled up,” hated ketchup and mayonnaise and loved orange juice.

“But mostly I’d like to talk about what an angel she’s always been,” Zaugg said. “She will always be our angel.”

Zaugg reached out to the hundreds of mourners who gathered at the church - friends and family - and told them how they all played a special part in Brooke’s life.

Her sisters and cousins laughed, played and cried with Brooke, Zaugg said. Her grandparents could “love and spoil her” and make her happy, Zaugg said. Her parents saw Brooke grow from a child into a “beautiful, intelligent, loving, faithful, sweet young lady,” Zaugg said. Her friends helped mold her into the person she became, said Zaugg.

“I’d like to think Brooke [had everything] a girl would want,” she said.
Prior to Zaugg’s words, Father Paul A. Gotta told mourners to celebrate Brooke’s life and the time they had to spend and share with her.

“No matter what things annoy you in the course of the day, in the scheme of life they’re not big things,” Gotta said. “When we’re young, we always think there is enough time. … This tragedy shows us we don’t always have time. We have to make every moment count.”

According to her obituary, Brooke is survived by her parents, Selina and Michael; her two sisters, Amber and Cearra; her maternal grandparents, Josephine (Wheat) and Lawrence Barnett, Jr. of East Windsor; her paternal grandparents, Gary and Rose Mary (Modugno) Wormstedt of Broad Brook; her maternal great-grandfather, James Wheat; her maternal great-grandmother, Sally Barnett; her paternal great-grandmother, Georgette Modugno; her aunts and uncles, Lawrence Barnett III, Rose Zaugg, Regina Wormstedt, David Agey, Robert Wormstedt and Shelley Brownbill; her cousins, Bradyn, Kayla, Jordan and Lillian.