Carol Stream woman remembered as free spirit, adventurer
Chase Froese could catch you off guard.
She liked to quiz her friends and co-workers at Starbucks on what she called the "Question of the Day."
Sometimes she'd pose something silly: What movie star would you marry?
But no matter the question, she would almost always ask "why?" And that inevitably led to a deeper conversation.
"When you met her, she was very full of life, very cheerful, and yet she had this complex layer of always asking philosophical questions," said Luke Robinson, her supervisor for her on-campus job at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Froese, a 20-year-old from Carol Stream, went missing Friday evening while swimming with friends in Lake Michigan at Porter Beach in northwest Indiana. Her body was recovered Sunday near Indiana Dunes State Park, the apparent victim, authorities said, of an accidental drowning. Her family says she was an average swimmer, and investigators believe she got caught in a rip current.
"As a parent you never plan for this and I just advise every parent to really enjoy your kids," her dad, Greg Froese, said Monday. "It's a real gift at the end of day, and you don't know how long you have it."
Friends remembered Froese as curious, spiritual and adventurous. She had traveled around the globe with her family on trips through Wheaton Bible Church. But in the past few years, she was eager to branch out to find new experiences.
"When she graduated high school and went on to college there was a sense of, 'Wow there's a cool freedom I have in this world, and I just want to make sure I soak up all of it," said Kyle Reschke, a pastor at her church.
Froese graduated in 2013 from Wheaton Academy in West Chicago, where she played the violin in orchestra. Before a Christmas concert her senior year, her music teacher Steve Willemssen asked her to gather the performers and lead a prayer before taking the stage.
"She said, 'When we play our instruments, we are the heralds of joy,'" Willemssen remembered. "'We are telling people to be joyful.'"
It struck the teacher so much that he kept those words in his cellphone and still refers to them before concerts, a reminder that they're not simply putting on a show.
"She had a deep way of thinking about life," Willemssen said. "It was deep, but also clear. She had a lot of insight into life and into faith and shared it in a way that was understandable for a lot of people."
She also had a humorous side, bringing back Willemssen an indigenous instrument made out of goats' nails from a trip to Latin America that now sits on his desk.
"She was a very outgoing, fun-loving, quick-to-laugh individual," her uncle Sam Froese said. "She was great with people, quick friends with pretty much everyone."
Froese's travels with her family took her to Peru, Bolivia, and every summer, Canada. The Froeses recruited Wheaton Bible Church worshippers for the visit to a Native American community in Ontario, where they did morning Bible studies, camping and learned about "life with a group of people that view the world differently than we do," said Reschke, the church's pastor of global mobilization.
Teens from the Whitefish River First Nation gravitated toward Froese, a good listener with a knack for making connections across cultures, for making her friends feel important.
"You leave a conversation with her and go, 'That's just one of the sweetest, kindest girls you ever met," Reschke said.
In Calvin College's communications and marketing department, you'd often find Froese sitting cross-legged, clutching her coffee with two hands and getting her co-workers to open up.
"She was very much a people person," her boss, Robinson, said. "I think the reason why she means so much to so many is because of that outward focus, that interest in others that showed through."
She was a "rising star," who wrote content for the liberal arts school's website and helped organize campus events in addition to doing hair and makeup for Calvin Theatre Company. Robinson said she was known to sing in the hallways and for a loud sneeze that would startle the office, where a student has placed on her workstation a bouquet of gladiolas, "very much like her personality, very bright and bold in color."
After a long day at work, she and her student co-workers played darts in the office.
"Chase was our only lefty, and she had a certain flair: She would always fling the darts at the board, almost like she was pitching a softball game, and was almost always barefoot," senior Anna Delph said in an email. "There are holes she put in the backboard (and in the stacked boxes that the board sits on) that will always be there, as permanent as her memory. But that was what I understood about Chase, she was a free spirit."
Froese, who majored in philosophy and business, was accepted into a selective, three-week program as a sophomore at L'Abri Fellowship's Christian study center in the Swiss Alps.
"Chase was a great fit for the program: She was responsible, capable, independent and motivated," her philosophy professor Lee Hardy wrote in an email. "She was younger than the other students in the program ... But that was just like Chase: She was adventurous, eager for experience, always ready to grab an educational opportunity."
Wheaton Academy plans to hold a prayer service for students, faculty and staff at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
Visitation will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Friday and again from 10 a.m. Saturday until her funeral at 11 a.m. at Wheaton Bible Church, 27W500 North Ave., West Chicago.
Despite their own grief, her parents are worried about how Froese's friends are handling her death.
"We just can't be focusing on ourselves," her dad said. "Life can't be lived that way."