DENHAM SPRINGS — Family, friends, teammates and classmates are saying an impossible goodbye to 17-year-old Adelie Latta, a girl her loved ones describe as joyful, outgoing and full of life. Latta died on Nov. 30 following complications from a serious car crash on Nov. 3.
Latta’s aunt, Shelby Moore, said her niece was always making jokes, and friends with everyone she met.
“To know her was absolutely to love her,” she said. “She was the silliest, funniest girl that you would ever meet. She always was cracking dad jokes or inappropriate jokes. She was always making everybody laugh that she crossed paths with. There’s no way that you could meet her and not like her.”
Fighting for weeks
Latta was in a serious car crash on Nov. 3, and has been fighting in the hospital ever since.
“Her mother and I and a friend, we were actually in Boston whenever we got the phone call, so we were halfway across the United States, and we booked a flight home immediately to get back to her,” Moore said. “I always thought that if something happened to somebody, I wished that it would happen immediately, because you don’t want to sit there and suffer for so long with the unknown. But I honestly feel like that was God’s way of preparing us and letting us say our goodbyes.”
After the crash, Moore told UWK that Latta had head trauma. In the early days following the crash, the family saw small signs of hope.
“There was one point toward the beginning, when they started trying to wean her off of some of the medications that she was giving some responses by squeezing our hands,” Moore said. “I feel like that is a blessing in itself, for her parents. Some comfort, being able to, ‘Hey, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand,’ and getting a little bit of response out of her, like she did.”
But then, her lungs started to fail.
“They were able to get her lungs to where they needed to be,” she said. “Then whenever they got back to being able to work on her brain, the infection that was in her brain had gone too far, so they were unable to correct it at that point.”
Walk of Honor
At just 17 years old, Latta is giving back to those in critical need in an incredible way: through organ donation.
“Her mom said that whenever she got her license, she asked her mom what exactly being an organ donor means,” Moore said. “Her mom told her everything that she needed to know about it. And Addie’s exact words were, ‘If I can’t use it, let somebody else have it.'”
“We found out at 11 o’clock last night she was an organ donor. So the hospital contacted us at 11 last night and said that we needed to be at the hospital at 9 o’clock this morning for the Walk of Honor,” Moore said. There were probably 75 to 100 people there, who were able to come on such short notice.”
“Some of the nurses who weren’t even working this morning still came in to do the Walk of Honor for Addie, because she touched so many people in there.”
Remembering Addie
Latta was a senior at Denham Springs High School, and a member of the powerlifting team. “Each year that she was able to, she ended up going to state. She set several personal records. She was a little beast, for sure, but all of her teammates definitely loved her and looked up to her,” Moore said.
“Her legacy did not die when she did. She was an inspiration to a lot of people, especially a lot of her teammates. Everybody at that school is is heartbroken.”
Moore said there are countless memories she has of Latta, but one of the things she will always remember is her her silly personality. “Anytime Lil Boosie came on, she would crank it up and she would wrap every single word,” Moore recalled. “As a matter of fact, we didn’t care who was listening, on the way out of the hospital we played it loud in the parking garage. We did not care. We did it in honor of our silly girl. I didn’t care who was looking. It was for her.”
Leaning on faith
Moore said Latta’s family is doing as well as they can be given the circumstances, and she is grateful for their faith to help them get through. “Thank God that our hearts in the right place, because without the faith that we have had through all of this, we definitely would not have made it,” Moore said. “We know that she’s done with her suffering, and she is in a much better place than we are, and she’s in a much better place than she was for the last 29 days.”
“It is literally faith in our hearts, being in the right place with God, that is holding us together. We know that we will meet again.”
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