Lecanto, Fla. ? About 1,000 mourners gathered Saturday to say goodbye to the 9-year-old Florida girl who was abducted from her bed and allegedly slain by a sex offender staying in a nearby home.

Relatives, neighbors and friends filled a Presbyterian church for a memorial service to remember Jessica Marie Lunsford. They gazed at a photo montage of her life: an infant being embraced by her parents, a toddler playing on a playground swing, a child posing behind the steering wheel of a car.

Surrounded by family, Archie, left, and Ruth Lunsford, right foreground, release balloons Saturday afternoon after their granddaughter, Jessica Lunsford's, public memorial service in Lecanto, Fla.

The final shot showed a broadly smiling Jessica wearing a fuzzy, pink bucket hat — the same photo seen on fliers posted across Citrus County after the third-grader’s disappearance.

“I always said she would come home,” wept Mark Lunsford, Jessica’s father. “And she did.”

She was last seen in February when her grandmother tucked her into bed after attending church. The third-grader’s body was found March 19, about 150 yards from her house, near a mobile home where convicted sex offender John E. Couey had been staying at the time of her abduction.

Medical examiners said Jessica had been sexually assaulted and suffocated.

She was buried barely 100 yards from where Sheriff Jeff Dawsy set up his command center for the search.

Jessica’s father and Dawsy again called for toughening the state’s laws against sexual offenders. Couey is a repeat felon previously convicted of a sex crime against a minor and had once claimed helplessness in controlling his urges.

Authorities say Couey, 46, confessed to kidnapping and killing Jessica. He is charged with murder, battery, kidnapping and sexual battery on a child under 12.