At the Alternative Learning Center in Rochester, Quackenbush taught students whose lives sometimes lacked the stability to learn. ‘SHE TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE’Ī graduate of the University of Minnesota and Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Quackenbush started teaching as a special education teacher, then later as a science teacher. Claude neighborhood.Īlthough Higgs, 36, was on parole for a robbery and sexual assault he committed in Minnesota when he was 19, Quackenbush told her family to look past his record, according to the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. After Quackenbush moved to New Orleans in 2019, Higgs joined her a year later and moved into her house on the city’s famed Desire Street in the St. She and Higgs, both Minnesota natives, had dated in Rochester. Both had been living in Rochester, Minn.įriends say Quackenbush’s ability to see the best in others and not judge a person based on their past misdeeds may have accounted for the relationship with Higgs. Preston Higgs is suspected of killing his girlfriend, Liz Quackenbush, in New Orleans in March 2021. Law enforcement authorities have tracked him to Iowa and believe he may be en route to Minnesota. New Orleans police identified Quackenbush’s former boyfriend, Preston Higgs, who lived with her at the time, as the suspect.

“We had so many pivotal moments and - I’m sure I’m not alone in saying this - we fully expected to have more and more adventures.” “It changed the trajectory of my life,” said Jess Sarver-Mullan, a former Rochester resident who first met Quackenbush at Willow Creek Middle School when they were both students. Having known her, they can’t imagine a world without her. Three weeks after she was found fatally stabbed in her New Orleans house on March 3, colleagues, friends and students are emerging from a “numbing grief” to talk about the magnitude of the loss. She wouldn’t stop until the learning was meaningful to them.” “But as a teacher, she was so tenacious about when a kid was struggling. “They knew that she genuinely cared about how they were as human beings,” said Marian Holtorf-Jewell, a learning center colleague. She “fiercely cared” about her students and their experiences. Quackenbush, 39, taught at the Rochester Alternative Learning Center for five years before moving to New Orleans in 2019 to teach at a similar school there. Colleagues say her great gift was the ability to connect with students who felt like castoffs in a traditional school setting. But it is impossible to assess her dynamic life - a life taken too soon when she was stabbed to death earlier this month - without taking into account her skill as a teacher. Liz Quackenbush was many things: an adventurer, an artist, a free soul, spontaneous and unafraid.

Preston higgs new orleans