As I was scrolling through my feed on Twitter, I saw a very special tweet that spoke volumes in 140 characters or less.
"19 year old Gabriella Sicard passed away in a car accident," the tweet read. "[...] her dream was to trend on twitter help! #FlyHighGaby"
My immediate response was to retweet the hashtag '#flyhighgaby' and help Gaby Sicard trend, but the curiosity about and frightening reality of her accident had hooked me. I wanted to know what happened; what caused a girl not too different from myself to meet with fate?
It turns out that Gaby Sicard, a 19 year old college student at Penn State had been driving westbound on I-80 when she began to pass a tractor trailer. As she moved back into the right lane of the highway, she lost control of her car, which then skidded and ricocheted off of the guardrail, sending her back into the line of traffic. The tractor trailer collided with Sicard's car, sending it off the road completely, but not before it had tumbled over.
Gabriella Sicard, 19, passed away on December 28.
It's like any other awful car accident--a car totaled, a life lost, families left distraught--and naturally it elicited an emotional response from me. But I just couldn't shake it.
