More than 70 people from across the country will be helped due to organ and tissue donation from a Franklin teenager.
Emma Moore’s heart has gone to a teenager. Four adults across the country who have been in need of a transplant got a call this week that an organ had been found.
And about 70 other people with health needs will be helped by Moore’s decision to donate her tissue, bones and skin.
The Franklin junior, 17, died unexpectedly after being injured in a car accident. She died this week at Riley Hospital for Children at Indiana University Health, where she had been taken after a car accident on Friday night. She was one of five people injured.
Her family had talked together about donating organs previously and Emma would have loved the fact that she was helping other people, said Jenny Moore, her mother.
“She would have wanted that all the way,” she said.
Emma Moore could always be counted on to do the right thing, loved doting on her dog and wanted to be a lawyer so she could help people, her mom said.
Moore had danced for most of her young life and her family is remembering her as a person who had a drive to help people and always wanted to do the right thing.
Whenever she was conflicted about something, she would go to her mother, Jenny Moore, and explain the situation. She wanted reassurance that what she did was always the right thing to do, Moore said.
“She was full of heart,” her mom said. “She always wanted to make sure that she didn’t hurt anybody.”
Emma was sassy, had a big heart and loved her dog, Max.
Emma was scouring the internet one day about two years ago and saw a picture of Max. She decided that she had to have him. The family went to the Johnson County Animal Shelter and brought him home.
“She was like “mommy, we have to go get him,” Jenny Moore said.
The duo were inseparable, with Max, a Great Dane, curling up on the couch with Emma and sharing her pillow in her bed every night.
That was who Emma was, always caring about other people and animals, her mother said.
“She would bring home things that she was worried about that day,” she said. “She would say ‘mommy, did I do the right thing?'”
The junior at Franklin Community High School talked about being a lawyer so she could help people. She had volunteered to help with the Riley Dance Marathon at her school, after knowing that a baby cousin had been helped by the hospital and that her family had participated in the marathon before.
“She just had that personality and she wanted to use that to help any way she could,” she said.
And she had recently joined student council, so she could get a look at how government procedure might work. She had a blast decorating for and planning the school’s homecoming festivities, Jenny Moore said.
“I think she had begun to find her niche and spread her wings and wanted to be involved in the student body,” she said.
Teachers remember her as a teen with a sweet personality, said Steve Ahaus, principal at Franklin Community High School.
“She was just a really positive, sweet, caring person that (teachers) have just enjoyed having in class,” he said.
Counselors were at the school a therapy dog was brought to the school to help students mourning her death, Ahaus said.
“It is a difficult thing to get through, but we have had a lot of good support from the community,” Ahaus said.
Moore was active in Franklin as a member of Grace United Methodist Church and on the Rosette competition dance team at Le Rose Dance Academy, where she had danced for about 15 years, her mother said.
Dancing was something her parents enrolled her and her siblings in.
Moore excelled and decided she wanted to keep dancing. She earned a spot on the academy’s competition dance team and she and her sisters were known for dancing and pirouetting around the kitchen.
“She never really wavered, she just stayed with it,” Moore said.
Emma liked the opportunity dance provided to just live in the moment. She could be fun with jazz and contemporary dances and graceful and elegant while doing ballet, her mother said.
She thrived as someone who wanted other people to be seen. She never took large dance solos for herself, instead doing smaller solos in other dances, said Moore.
But she was a hard worker and a no-nonsense person. She was fierce and could always be counted on to work hard when needed.
Emma was incredibly proud of a scholarship she earned to dance in New York City next summer after she mastered a dance style she was originally uncomfortable with.
“She was so proud of that, oh my gosh, she was lit up like the Fourth of July that she got that,” her mom said.
