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Editors note: Staff writer Samantha House contributed to this report.

Syracuse, NY Connie Tuori, 93, had no fear of her home in the treacherous Skyline Apartments. Just look at how she lived.

The daughter of Italian immigrants on Syracuses North Side, she paid her way through Syracuse University in the 1950s, a time when single, immigrant-family women rarely did such things. She worked summers alone as a waitress in the Adirondacks, getting free room and board in return.

After college, she taught school in Syracuse and in California, along the Mexican border. And then she taught in Italy for several years before she moved to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach English for a year and a half.

Fiercely independent, she traveled the world without being harmed, only to be killed in her home, a Syracuse apartment in a building overrun with crime and neglect.

In the early 1980s, she moved back to Syracuses Park Street -- down the street from where shed grown up. Thats when Patrick Leone, of Minoa, remembers going to her house as a preschooler, to be watched while his mother worked.

Leone is Tuoris great grand-nephew. As he grew up, Aunt Connie was the relative with all the stories.

Like the time she went on an African safari, sleeping on the ground with only a sheet. Or the postcard from Antarctica, where she bemoaned getting bored with penguins. Or the time, in her 80s, that she broke her hip getting chased by monkeys in Southeast Asia. (She flew home by herself anyway.)

Leone recalls Aunt Connies story about getting mugged as a young woman in Italy. She was unhurt and unfazed. I dont think it ever really scared her, Leone recalled. It didnt deter her.

So what did Connie Tuori think of Skyline Apartments, the place that everyone -- her own family included -- believed was too dangerous a place for her to live?

Skyline Apartments at 753 James Street owned by former NFL star Tim Green and his son, Troy. The apartments are the subject of intense scrutiny by tenants for crime and alleged neglect. Photo by N. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.comN. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.com

For much of her life, Skyline had been a luxury apartment complex. It wasnt bad when she moved in two decades ago. And Connie Tuori wasnt going to be forced out by her family.

The stubbornness that got her around the world kept her longer (at Skyline) than she should have been, said her niece, Patti Tuori, of Arizona. She was comfortable there. She knew her building, knew her stores.

Leone agreed, noting the familys efforts to convince her to leave.

It wasnt a secret that she wasnt in a great place, Leone recalled. But she didnt want to change. Hey, why dont you move? But she didnt want to. She had been in so many exotic places, that being in an apartment in Syracuse probably didnt faze her much.

Neighbors described her as a sweet, harmless old lady who, until her death, walked by herself up to shop on Butternut Street. She refused to consider that her daily life might be dangerous, said Sharon Sherman, of the Greater Syracuse Tenants Network.

Her legendary fearlessness was a hallmark of the lifelong bachelorette.

At age 13, the fearlessness landed her on the front page of the Syracuse Herald-Journal.

Connie, then a eighth-grade student at Grant Junior High School, talked to reporters in January 1941 after a scuffle with her brother over the then-ongoing World War II. The wrestling match happened when Connies little brother teased her about a German attack on London, according to the story in The Post-Standards archives.

The teen avidly followed updates on war and was inclined to agree with the English, she told reporters. So when her brother provoked her, she threw him out the back door of their familys Park Street home. Connie then accidentally pushed her hand through a glass window while trying to lock her brother outside.

This probably marks the first bloodshed in Syracuse, and maybe the United States, over the war, she gravely told reporters.

Family said that Connie Tuoris love of history and world events drew her to the farthest reaches of the globe: Revolutionary China, before it opened to the West; Afghanistan in the 1950s; Iran, long after the Islamic Revolution (getting a visa through the United Kingdom). Relatives still have the kimono dresses she sent back from Japan.

In the end, she visited all seven of the worlds continents.

Shed work during the school year while living frugally, then travel during the summers, Patti Tuori recalled.

Shed get family to drop her off at the Greyhound station and travel the country by bus in search of a cheap plane fare. To save money, shed stay in youth hostels, even into old age. Her trips would last several months and might, for example, begin in Italy and end in Spain.

I remember dropping her off at the bus station with two little suitcases and shed be gone for three months, Patti Tuori said. She met a lot of people when she was traveling. Shed say, If I ever have troubles when Im traveling, Ill just stop somebody and get them to help me. She was very insistent. She got her way.

Connie, who retired from teaching in 1992, shared her travels in richly detailed letters published in The Post-Standard throughout 1997.

The letters focused on the people Connie had met while living and travelling abroad. She remembered a lovestruck man in Afghanistan in the late 1950s who after eating pilaf and mutton with her told her about the woman he had fallen for but was prohibited from marrying.

Connie described getting lost in Myanmar, where she traversed spice markets and bumpy country roads, during her second trip to the country in 1997. She recalled her 1956 bus trip to a 1,000-year-old temple in southern India and the time in 1970 when she ditched an obstinate tour guide in Uzbekistan.

In 1998, Connie asked the public to donate money to help a child in Uganda get an education. She had just gotten back from a five-week tour of east Africa, where her heart had been broken by the plight of a young boy struggling to pay for secondary school. She spoke to a reporter with The Post-Standard and asked interested donors to call her.

At age 85, she wanted to go on another African safari, her family said. But she was incensed to find out that the age limit for the trip was 82.

They didnt know who they were talking to, Patti Tuori said, laughing. Still, Connie made it to Malaysia as an octogenarian, fracturing her hip in the monkey episode.

In later years, she also held speaking engagements at local bookstores, like Barnes & Noble, in which shed describe her adventures.

She was kind of singularly obsessed with traveling and the world, Patti Tuori recalled.

When home, Tuori would walk or take the bus wherever she wanted to go. She didnt drive. In planning trips, shed take a bus to the downtown library to get one travel guide for the trip.

Once, Leone recalls seeing her, by chance, walking by herself on Hiawatha Boulevard near Destiny USA Where are you going? he asked her. She hitched a ride with him back home.

But for someone who couldnt go a mile without walking it herself, Connie Tuori did more in her life than most dream of.

Ive been too many places. Its boring to go back to them, shed say, half-joking, in later life.

That spirit never left her.

She had no fear, Patti Tuori said. Shed been everywhere, shed seen so much. Shed been walking around the slums of whatever country on her own. Living in a bad neighborhood in Syracuse was just another trip for her.

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Staff writer Douglass Dowty can be reached at ddowty@syracuse.com or 315-470-6070.

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Connie Tuori, 93, survived Afghanistan, Antarctica and African safari, only to be killed in her Syracuse apar - syracuse.com