ELGIN, S.C. — Elgin residents organized a community yard sale on Saturday, hoping to mend a broken community by finally giving Adriana Laster a proper burial.
"If this was my child, I'd want my baby home," Louete Williams said.
The community has had to wait years for the opportunity to honor her life because, until recently, no one knew where she was.
"We as a community wanted to come together and help the Laster family with the remainders to take them back to Florida," organizer Jeanette Murphy said.
Murphy said it was the least she could do after Laster's body was found in a sand pit in January. Laster first went missing in 2011. Freddie Grant, who is already serving time for the murder of Gabbie Swainson, is also charged with Laster's murder.
"Every time you walk into a store, you see her picture," Murphy said. "I always wanted to make sure she came back alive, and she didn't, so it just touched my heart when they found her."
While the yard sale's organizers hoped to provide closure, the event also brought the community a new sense of family.
"Everybody gets together in Kershaw and Lugoff and Elgin," Williams said. "We get together, we pull together and try to help each other, and this was something that needed to be done."
"This is not what our community is about. We're about being together, and you can see with the people coming in, most of them donating money, they'll purchase something and say, 'Take this too,'" Murphy said.
All the donations and proceeds from the yard sale and the sympathy cards that community members signed will go to Laster's family. Late Saturday afternoon, Murphy said she passed her goal of $1,000. In total, she raised $1,700 to help the Laster family.