Family and friends of Symia Knight on Sunday afternoon remembered the 12-year-old girl who died from injuries she suffered in a car-truck collision Friday morning.
“She was very popular and very loving,” said her godmother, Tiffany Green, as she and others who mourned her headed out to a memorial service to be held in her honor at the site of the accident.
Knight was a passenger in a gray Chevrolet that was hit in the rear by a pickup truck, Atlanta police said. The driver of the truck, Robert Culver, who police said returned to the scene, has been cited with misdemeanor second-degree vehicular homicide and failure to yield.
Green said the family has not been focusing on those details, however.
“We really haven’t discussed the accident,” she said. “We’re just trying to celebrate Symia’s memory.”
They remember that she served as a vice president on the student council at her school, Cooper Middle in Austell. And that she played tuba in the band.
At the memorial, “We want to celebrate her memory, lay down flowers, just feel her presence,” Green said.
The memorial was to take place at the scene of the crash, at the intersection of Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway and Fulton Industrial Boulevard in Atlanta.
Funeral services have not yet been set, but Green said it was expected arrangements would be made with Hanley-Shelton Funeral Directors in Marietta.
For now, she said, “We are just coping. Everybody is mourning in their own ways, trying to deal with it.”
Among those coping, she said, are Symia’s mother, Shacora Knight, and three siblings.
“Of course,” Green said, “it’s very hard.”
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