“I was friends with her,” she said. “She was amazing. She was so bright. So beautiful.”
McMullen was speaking of Mikayla Miller, a 16-year-old Hopkinton girl who was found dead off West Main Street on the morning of April 18. Family members and advocates feel authorities are not doing enough enough to investigate how Miller died.
Hundreds of people flooded the Hopkinton Town Common late Wednesday afternoon, standing largely silent as they listened to a group of speakers inside the common’s gazebo. Many held signs reading “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for Mikayla.
The rally brought supporters locally, regionally and even from out of state. Among the 29 people who spoke to the Daily News, 20 said they lived in Hopkinton or were recent graduates of Hopkinton High. But the group also included one person each from Worcester, Boston, Rhode Island and Connecticut.
HOPKINTON, Mass. – Mikayla Miller and her mother Calvina Strothers were two peas in a pod.
She loved to make her mom tea every night and was often her mom s dinner date, as the two enjoyed going out to eat. They traveled together regularly, with quick trips from their home in Massachusetts to Maine or New Hampshire and had plans to return to Trinidad soon. Mikayla was only 16-years-old. She was my bright and shining star in this crazy world, Strothers said at a rally Thursday for her daughter, less than a month since her death.
On the morning of April 18, Mikayla, a Black teenager, was found dead in a wooded area by a jogger in what the Middlesex County District Attorney s Office initially said was not considered a suspicious death. It remained an “open and active” investigation, the office said at the time.