Ruth Pearl, the mother of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was brutally murdered by Muslim extremists in Pakistan in 2002, died on July 20 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 85.

Daniel Pearl, The Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped while reporting in Karachi. Despite pleas from his parents and desperate efforts to win his release by the U.S. government, his kidnappers beheaded him on Feb. 1, 2002, recording a video of his last words: “My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish.

Mrs. Pearl, a software developer, had retired by the time of her son’s murder. Afterward, she threw herself into running the Daniel Pearl Foundation. Her grief drove her, she said, but so did her memories of growing up in Iraq, and her desire to counter the hatred both she and her son had encountered.