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According to the account of grief-stricken residents, the town of Dalton, Ga. gathered together as a community on Sunday to vaguely remember Rachel Milliner, the teenage victim of last week’s hit-and-run car accident.
“Rachel never, so far as I can recall, had a mean word to say to anybody,” recounted classmate Alex Johnston, who sat behind Rachel last year in Algebra—unless it was the Rachel that sat in front of him the year before in Geometry. “She will be missed. I think.”
Friends and community members expressed feelings of sorrow at the loss of young life, heartache in the fact of this senseless killing, and frustration at not quite being able to remember what Rachel looked like. Some figured that Rachel was the girl who was always talking about horses. Others contended that Rachel was the girl whose family owned a speedboat. All, however, reported only being able to remember Rachel and her life as a sort of blur, as if seen in soft-focus or underwater.
“The candlelight service was very tasteful,” Johnston said. “From what I can remember about her, I guess Rachel would have liked that.”
The memorial featured a series of eulogies from familiar-enough town figures presumably close to the deceased, a series of family videos from her early childhood, and a picture slideshow set to Rachel’s favorite songs—all of which helped to place Rachel loosely within the social reality of the town, though not bring her to clear and distinct recall.
“Rachel may be gone, but her memory lives on, however hazy and malformed," said Ashton Barkley, principal of the high school that Rachel attended, at least according to some people who had a vague memory of Rachel going there.
A monument will be erected at the site of Milliner’s death in the next months, featuring a local sculptor’s rendering of that girl with the red hair who everyone is pretty sure might have been Rachel Milliner.
