On Sunday, thousands of sports car owners, engines revving, drove from St. Louis, Mo., to Washington, Mo., to honor a teen who died Nov. 7 from osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer.
The funeral procession, widely reported by local stations, was for Alec Ingram, a 14-year-old from Washington, who, according to the Facebook page “Alec Ingram’s Fight with Cancer,” was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 2015, after he broke his arm “after a single jump on the trampoline.” During the years that followed, Ingram received surgeries and many rounds of chemotherapy.
Read MoreThe event, named “Sports Cars for Alec,” was organized by a charity called Sydney’s Soldiers Always, which raises funds to make bucket-list wishes come true for children with terminal illnesses. Dana Christian Manley, who started the charity after losing her own 8-year-old daughter, Syndey, to cancer, told CNN that all of the “cancer families” in the local community “become family to each other.” Manley also shared with CNN that she spoke with Ingram’s mother, Jenny Ingram, after the funeral, and Jenny told her, “It was so overwhelmingly good for me to see how much my boy was loved.”
According to Manley, over 2,157 cars participated in the procession along with 140 motorcycles.
Before Ingram died, a local news station, KMOV4, reported a touching story about how, while Ingram was in the hospital undergoing treatment, his classmates brought a life-size cardboard cutout of Ingram to school so that “he wouldn’t miss out.”
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The community’s outpouring of love for the boy was evident not only in the elaborate sports car procession, but in the hundreds of comments posted on social media.
“The turnout of cars is impressive but I was even more impressed by the community who came out to show support,” one commenter wrote on Facebook. “The whole route was packed with people holding signs, waving, etc.”
As for the sports car owners who turned out for the procession, most had never met the boy. But as one woman with a yellow Jeep told KMOV4, “Never meeting him, I feel like I’ve already met him here. It’s phenomenal to see all these cars coming in here.”
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