Brassy. Brave. A softie. Humble. Obnoxious. Mystical. Down-to-earth. Fun. Tough.

Nicole duFresne, the 28-year-old actress from Minnesota who was killed on the Lower East Side last week, embodied all those characteristics, her close friends, mentors, and confidants said yesterday at a memorial service.

“She could make you laugh, then kick you in the teeth,” a friend, Tim Doyle, said.

“She was a study in contradictions, as all good artists are,” one of her acting teachers at Emerson College, Maureen Shea, said. On the stage and in life, Ms. Shea said, duFresne acted with a combination of “bravado, physicality, and a good deal of cheek.”

It was that same attitude, that same “tigerlike way, something she could not suppress,” her friend Mary Jane Gibson said, that pushed duFresne to confront her alleged killer, 19-year-old Rudy Fleming, who police said darted out at her and her friends on the darker parts of Clinton Street, demanding money and pistol-whipping her fiance, Jeffrey Sparks, in the face with a .357 Magnum.

The murder, and the subsequent arrest of Fleming and four other teenagers charged with a variety of crimes in that robbery and another, has dominated news reports in the past week. Since the shooting, Mr. Sparks, the marks of a gun handle circling his eye, said yesterday that he was burdened with the weight of regrets, regrets that he will carry forever.

“I just wish I reached out to grab her hand,” and walked away, he said. “I wish I was grumpier that night and said ‘Let’s go home’ earlier.”

Instead, he turned his back and began to walk away, and the next thing he heard was gunfire. One shot. Then he remembers himself on the cold pavement, next to duFresne’s body, telling her “to hold on, to fight.”

“She tried,” he said.

Mr. Sparks was the 17th person in a list of speakers to eulogize duFresne and announce a scholarship in her name at the Angel Orensanz Center, a synagogue located a few blocks away from the location where she was shot.

The ceremony finished in spectacle. After the service, friends began to form a procession line and light candles. Others picked up circus-like torches and began to swing them in circle formations as, their eyes closed, they danced down Rivington Street like dervishes.

There was a man in a poncho burning incense. Another man, in tribal fashion, was wielding feathers. Mr. Sparks, leading the procession toward the murder site, began pounding an African drum with a morose, syncopated beat.

At the corner of Rivington and Clinton streets, the crowd of about 150 passed a makeshift shrine to duFresne, which has grown in recent days with dozens of candles, notes, newspaper clippings, loose change in the formation of crucifixes, and other articles of grieving.

At the murder site Mr. Sparks kneeled on the pavement. He grabbed a piece of blue chalk from a bucket and stenciled the outlines of his fiancee’s body. He then outlined his outline with three layers of rope. As the drummers began to quicken the beat, he doused a bouquet of dead flowers in lighter fluid and then lit the flowers and duFresne’s outline on fire.

In the tenements above, young children crowded to the windows and snapped photographs.

The drumming went faster now, and the man wielding the feathers began swirling the air above the outline of duFresne’s body and teasing the flames into different formations, giving the illusion and contour of flesh.

Then it ended. Mr. Sparks cued the drummers to stop. When they did, those carrying candles took one last breath and blew the flames out.

“Thank you all for coming,” Mr. Sparks said, one hand raised.

It was a script duFresne would have appreciated, one person in the crowd suggested.