A Syrian shelling attack killed a journalist from Long Island as she tried to bring attention to the death and destruction brought by the Syrian government on its own people.

Marie Colvin, 56, worked as foreign correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times. She spent more than two decades searching the globe for human tragedies, so the world could find out about them.

Her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, said she never questioned her daughter about the dangers of her calling.

"It would have been the most useless conversation you could have had with my daughter," said Rosemarie Colvin. "From the time she was a little child, she was committed to doing things that were important. She was only a teenager when she marched in the civil rights movement [in Washington]. She was always a committed person."

Colvin was known for her work focusing on the plight of women and children in war, as well as the eye patch she wore after she was injured covering the conflicts in Sri Lanka in 2001.

She snuck into Syria and found Syrian gunners pounding an opposition stronghold in the besieged city of Homs.

The shelling killed Colvin and a French photojournalist, Remi Ochlik, who are two of 74 deaths reported Wednesday in Syria.

This week she reported on watching a baby die from the shelling, calling "it absolutely horrific."

"That baby is going to cause more people to think what is going on? Why is no one stopping this murder?" Colvin said in a phone interview with CNN shortly before her death.

Ann Cooper, a Columbia University professor of journalism who spent years as the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, says war correspondents are needed for first hand-reliable and independent reporting, and that sources involved in a conflict have an agenda.

"She clearly wanted to get this story out there. She wanted to put it in our faces and make us understand people are dying here and we're all just going on about our business. She just wasn't going to let that happen," said Cooper. "If it does help draw some more attention, I don't see a downside to that."

According to Reuters, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the death of Colvin and Ochlik an assassination and Marie Colvin's editor said that is entirely possible.

Reacting to Colvin's death, the White House called Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime "brutal" and Sarkozy said the Assad era has to end.

The United Nations estimated in January that Syrian President Assad's repression had killed 5,400 people.