Kristina “Tina” Griffen loved cats and her life was filled with music.
Griffen, 31, was walking to her University Heights home from a Tuesday night concert at Bogart’s when the very drunk woman fell 20 feet and landed on her head in a University of Cincinnati parking lot.
She died instantly.
“She was wearing moccasin-like boots that had no tread. She just slipped on the ice and took a real nasty fall,” said her brother Forrest Griffen, 36, of Fort Mitchell.
The Hamilton County Coroner’s Office, which declared Griffen’s death an accident, noted her blood-alcohol content was 0.295, almost four times Ohio’s legal limit for driving of 0.08.
She apparently fell from a walkway on a retaining wall along UC’s Sander Hall. The walkway has a metal railing.
Her brother noted the irony that his sister knew she was too drunk to drive home, so she tried to walk.
“That’s why it was a tragedy. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was just an accident,” he said.
The concert was by Dark Star Orchestra, a cover band for the Grateful Dead, one of Tina Griffen’s favorite bands.
Music, her brother said, was a constant in her life.
Their mother and father were classical musicians and graduates of UC’s College-Conservatory of Music. Her father played the French horn; her mother, the flute.
Her mom, Karen, is retired from the New York City Metropolitan Opera.
Her mom was at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport on Wednesday, 20 minutes from boarding a flight to Minnesota to play in a concert, when she was contacted by authorities and told her daughter was dead.
“Thank God she didn’t get on that plane,” Forrest Griffen said.
As he talked, Forrest Griffen sat on the porch of his sister’s house - which she bought last summer - and one of her cats jumped up in the window. She had three.
“Cats were her favorite thing ever,” said Erika Denlinger, 21, of Clifton.
Denlinger works at the Riddle Road Market, where Kristina Griffen worked for nine years and was the assistant manager.
The store and its customers had become her second home. “She was the heart of the store,” Denlinger said.
The store has several photos of Griffen - tubing with a friend, standing above the California surf, sitting next to her mom. In all of them, she is smiling or laughing.
“She always had a smile on her face,” Denlinger said. “She had the most unique laugh ever. You could be having the worst day and she would make you laugh.”
The family grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., just north of New York City, but both Forrest and his sister attended UC and stayed in Cincinnati.
“She wasn’t even sure she was going to stay here in Cincinnati, but Cincinnati was very good to her,” her brother said.
Services are pending.

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