When Rachelle Bergeron graduated from law school, she knew she wanted to help people who did not have a voice. That passion took her first to India, where she represented women and children who had been trafficked, and for the last four years to the Pacific nation of Micronesia, where she was the acting attorney general for Yap State.

It was in Yap, islands that 11,000 people call home, where Ms. Bergeron was shot three times outside her home on Monday night. She had just returned after a daily run with her dog. Her husband and a local child they were about to adopt were inside baking brownies.

Ms. Bergeron, 33, and her dog were killed.

“In her short but influential career Rachelle used her legal education to touch the lives of people across the globe,” Laura A. Rosenbury, dean of the University of Florida Levin College of Law, said in a statement on Wednesday. Ms. Bergeron graduated from the school in 2010.

No arrests have been made, but her killing is under investigation by the authorities in Micronesia and the F.B.I., which sent agents to Yap this week. The cases she worked on will most likely undergo additional scrutiny.