Wednesday, students and friends gathered for a vigil at the site on Auburn University’s campus where 18-year-old Lauren Burk’s charred vehicle was discovered the Tuesday night.
The Georgia native was found on Alabama Highway 147 suffering from a fatal gunshot wound.
While more gatherings in Burk’s remembrance are sure to take place in both Auburn and Marietta, Ga., in the coming days, friends and well wishers are uniting through the Internet.
A Facebook Web page in tribute to Burk was started at approximately 6 a.m. Wednesday morning.
By 3 p.m. Thursday, that same Web page had more than 10,000 members from all over the country, with more than 100 members joining in just a one-hour period.
“It’s been incredible to see the enormous outpouring of support, not from just friends but also from complete strangers,” said Jay Seyfried, 21, an AU student that attended high school with Burk. “But anybody who ever had a chance to really know Lauren couldn’t help but like her.”
The Facebook tribute page is a forum where both those who knew Burk and those who never met her shared fond memories and expressed condolences on behalf of the first-year AU student.
While the pain of the loss is still fresh on the mind of the community, being able to talk about those feelings and share pleasant memories of someone following a tragic event, can be an effective tool in coping, according to licensed marriage and family therapist Linda Wilkins of Wellspring Counseling Center in Opelika.
“Whether people physically meet at a vigil or it’s through a forum like an Internet tribute page, this gives them a chance to join together and express their feelings about someone they cared for and affirm the fact that the person’s life they’re remembering meant something,” said Wilkins. “It also in many ways puts us in touch with our own mortality.”
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