A mum casually scrolling her Facebook feed one day discovered the devastating news that her precious daughter had been killed.
Deborah Byrne, 47, saw tributes posted to her daughter, Brogan Warren, 21, and began to worry.
Speaking to The Sun she says the ‘penny dropped’ when a friend private messaged her to say how sorry she was to hear the news.
‘She said there had been a horrific crash the night before, on May 22, and she would be there for me,’ she said.
‘At that moment my heart shattered.’
Gathering the family – Brogan’s dad Joff, and her two sisters Taylia, 23, and Tianna, 5, – Deborah went on a hunt for answers.
‘We were desperately trying to get hold of the Northamptonshire Police to get official confirmation of what had happened.
‘But because the crash had happened in Oxfordshire, 45 miles away, Brogan’s name wasn’t coming up on our local police’s system.’
Finally they learned what had happened to their girl.
While driving home from a festival with some friends, Brogan’s car crashed into another car on a highway bypass.
Brogan and her friends all died, while the driver in the other car with his wife and three kids recovered in hospital.
Deborah learned that the crash had happened at around 11:15pm in the evening, but she was asleep having last texted Brogan at 8pm.
Horrifyingly, police had come to Deborah’s house with the news at 5am but were unable to wake her.
Deborah describes her girl as a ‘free spirit’ and made sure her funeral was true to that.
‘After they laid her body in the ground, everyone poured flowers and glitter onto her coffin. She was such a free-spirit, it’s what she would have wanted,’ Deborah said.
‘But I didn’t want to think of it as a funeral, more as a festival of her life.
‘Brogan was such a lovely, kind girl and now we don’t have her anymore and I’ve been left with so much pain.
‘I couldn’t believe I’d found out about my daughter’s death on Facebook.’
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