‘We lost our best friend’: Boyfriend speaks out after young mother found dead on Kentucky highway
By DeAndria Turner
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SHELBY COUNTY, Kentucky (WLKY) — Lake Mingo is a place that Brianna Perry and her friends used to come to often. It’s still a place where her son comes to.
But now, that place will be full of memories of her after she was found on the side of I-64 near Shelbyville over the weekend.
“We’re in the dark. We have no clue. We just know that we lost our best friend,” said her boyfriend, Deric Smith.
Brianna was the oldest of six siblings, a mother, and never far from her two best friends, Allison and her boyfriend Deric.
As they sat in the place they once laughed with her, Lake Mingo, it was a reminder of the trio now broken, the hole she’s left behind is impossible to fill.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said Brianna was a passenger in a moving vehicle before somehow ending up on the highway. The family was left piecing together what little they knew, starting with a chilling message.
“I got an alert on my phone and it was an SOS alert. Called my mom, her mom called me asking if we all got the same message they got,” Smith said.
It was around 9:41 p.m. Friday night when dispatchers began getting calls, someone had seen a body lying in the eastbound lanes of I-64. Deputies responded to mile marker 26.4, where they found Brianna.
“When I read the SOS, I looked at my phone and the message I had sent her had been read 44 minutes before I got the SOS message,” Smith said.
A moment, he says, is engraved in his memory. Now, her friends and family just want answers as to what happened as they adjust to the new reality without her.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Department and Coroner’s Office are leading the investigation, with assistance from several agencies, including Kentucky State Police.
An autopsy is pending, and officials say the cause and manner of death have not yet been determined.
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