Caring, not cancer, defined life of social worker who helped kids

Inside the juvenile division of the Clark County Public Defender’s office, Nikki Krieger was known as a true believer with a gifted spirit.

As a social worker, she dedicated her life to helping some of our community’s most troubled young people. She stood by their side on the edge of the abyss of the justice system, always with an extended hand and an offer of hope.

“She goes out of her way to find kids placement and find them services,” Deputy Public Defender Kerri Maxey once told me. “She makes sure our kids in Clark County are taken care of when their families have let them down. She makes sure we don’t let them down. ... You have to be able to care about the people that don’t have people caring about them. We’re dealing with the type of kids that society doesn’t want to deal with anymore. They would just rather lock them up.

“But they have to know there is hope. We can change these kids. As long as you give them hope, then they have hope for themselves.”

Krieger worked on many of the toughest cases in the system. Children and teenagers from broken homes and drug-addicted families, victims of physical and sexual abuse: These were the kids Krieger fought for.

All while she also bravely battled glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.

Krieger lost her fight this past week at age 33. Family and friends gathered at her graveside Friday afternoon.

Cancer killed Nikki, but her mother, Mary Charf, reflects that it was also a cancer diagnosis that changed her life as a UNLV elementary education student and led to the pursuit of her true calling as a juvenile advocate. Diagnosed with spinal cord cancer just two days before her 21st birthday, her chemotherapy brought her in contact with other young people. Her oncologist asked that she reach out to encourage them to persevere through their own grueling treatments.

“She decided she wanted to help others,” Charf says. “After that, she decided to pursue social work and somehow help the kids.”

When the chance came to work in the juvenile division of the public defender’s office, she grabbed it.

“She absolutely loved it,” her mother says. “She was such an advocate for all the kids, no matter what they were in trouble for. She was always able to see their side, to look at their past, to look at their parents and the way they were raised.”

Nikki’s first cancer fight kept her from regularly attending university classes. When she returned after a year to UNLV, she met and fell in love with her future husband, Louis Krieger.

“I always said that if she hadn’t gotten cancer the first time, she would never have met Louis, who she ended up marrying,” Charf says. “She fell a year behind. She met her husband in college. He was and is an angel. ... He loved my daughter, knew what she had been through. She traveled the world with him.”

The grieving mother isn’t suggesting the disease was less than devastating, only that the terrible challenge of cancer also caused her daughter to grow in a special grace. She lived more, loved more, reached out more, and helped others even more than before.

Throughout her ordeal, Nikki’s family and friends were awed by her strength, selflessness and sense of humor.

In the final months — difficult days when she had every right to retreat from life — she pressed on. She worked when she was weak, met clients even when she was exhausted. She refused to quit.

“ ‘I gotta go to work; I gotta go to work,’ she’d say,” her proud and sad mother recalls. “She tried to go to work even when she could only work one day a week. She had the most positive attitude even on her sickest, worst day.”

Cancer did not define Nikki Krieger’s life. She leaves a legacy of courage and caring that reverberates with meaning.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. Follow him on Twitter @jlnevadasmith.