An impromptu memorial of flowers and messages has been created on an Irish roadway where a young Barrie woman died in a crash on Monday.
And as a small clutch of students from the University of Limerick School of Medicine — where 24-year-old Nelia Scheeres was entering her third year of studies — came to the site on Thursday, a few neighbours joined to share their grief and say a prayer.
Among them was an opera singer.
“He sang a beautiful song,” freelance journalist Mortimer Murphy told BarrieToday. “It was haunting. We were all in tears.”
Scheeres, who has a twin brother as well as a sister, was killed in a collision with a truck while driving home for lunch during her first day working in a medical practice.
The truck driver did not require medical attention, according to the Irish Times.
Scheeres, who graduated from Barrie's St. Joan of Arc Catholic High School in 2015, had recently moved to Kerry to start a work placement.
According to her LinkedIn page, she studied biomedical science from 2015 to 2019 at the University of Guelph, where she received a bachelor of science with honours.
In the fall of 2019, Scheeres started a four-year program at the Irish university’s Graduate Entry Medical School.
Prior to the crash, there had been concerns that the section of roadway where she was killed was never built for the increased volume of traffic, including daily truck travel.
Murphy, who was working in his home office approximately 50 yards from the crash site, has connected with three small groups of students who have come to Pope’s Cross, the intersection of the N69 roadway crash site, to offer their condolences.
Scheeres had quite a few friends at the university, he said, and they came from various towns in Kerry to pay their respects.
“It’s like a little shrine now,” Murphy said.
There has also been an outpouring of support for the family in the community.
Kerry's mayor, Coun. Jimmy Moloney, expressed his sympathies, as have the Lixnaw parish priest, and the president of the University of Limerick, professor Kerstin Mey, who called the news "heartbreaking."
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to Nelia’s family, especially to her parents Jan (Jaco) and Madine, her sister and fellow BMBS student Christi, her brother Ian and to her extended family and friends and fellow UL students," Mey said in a statement published by the Limerick Leader.
Scheeres had just begun an 18-week internship in Kerry as part of her course at the University of Limerick, where her sister is also a medical student.
The collision is still under investigation. It was the sixth fatal crash on Kerry roads this year.
County Kerry, a peninsula in the southwest region of Ireland, has a population of 147,000, roughly the same as Barrie.
