Amanda Knox returned to her hometown of Seattle on Tuesday and was as overcome with emotion as she was a day earlier in Italy, when she was acquitted on murder charges after four years in prison. "Thank you for being there for me," she tearfully told her supporters in front of a crowd of reporters from two continents.
"I'm really overwhelmed right now," she said at a news conference minutes after she was escorted off a British Airways flight out of London. "I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn't real."
Knox's life turned around dramatically Monday when an Italian appeals court threw out her conviction in the sexual assault and fatal stabbing of her British roommate. On Tuesday, a courtroom picture of the 24-year-old Knox crying after the verdict was read appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Italy, the United States, Britain and around the world.
After arriving at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Knox sobbed at the news conference and held her mother's hand as her lawyer Theodore Simon said her acquittal "unmistakably announced to the world" that she was not responsible for the killing of Meredith Kercher.
After her parents offered their thanks to Knox's lawyers and supporters, Knox spoke briefly, saying, "They're reminding me to speak in English, because I'm having problems with that."
"Thank you to everyone who believed in me, who has defended me, who has supported my family," she said. "My family's the most important thing to me so I just want to be with them."
Knox's acquittal, fueled by doubts over DNA evidence, stunned the victim's family and angered the prosecution, which insists that she was among three people who killed Kercher, 21. But for Knox's grandmother Elisabeth Huff, "it was like the weight of the world had gone."
"We all are as happy as can be. I can't tell you how long we've been looking forward to this day," Huff said outside her home in West Seattle, a tight-knit community a few miles across Elliott Bay from downtown.
Friends and family who held spaghetti dinners, bowling events and concerts to raise money for Knox's defense were thrilled to have her home, though her supporters were a small presence at airport compared with the media: dozens of U.S. and international reporters, along with cameras and satellite trucks.
"WELCOME HOME AMANDA," read the marquee at a record store in the neighborhood where Knox grew up. Another welcome sign was hung at her father's house. A bar offered half-price drinks to celebrate her acquittal. At least one TV station in Washington state tracked the progress of her flight on the air using a plane-tracking website.
Knox was a University of Washington student studying abroad in Perugia when Kercher was killed in 2007.
Kercher's family said during an emotional news conference Tuesday that they were back to "square one."
"If those two are not the guilty parties, then who are the guilty people?" asked Lyle Kercher, a brother of the victim.
Knox has been the center of attention since her arrest on Nov. 6, 2007 - four days after Kercher's body was found dead in an apartment. The 24-year-old student from Seattle, who was studying abroad in Perugia, has been described by her family and friends as an innocent girl caught in an Italian judicial nightmare. A third person, Rudy Hermann Guede of the Ivory Coast, was also convicted of Kercher's murder in a separate proceeding. Italy's highest criminal court has upheld Guede's conviction and his 16-year-prison sentence. Guede denies wrongdoing.
