The prom photo that haunts Suffolk County tells a story of young love frozen in magenta and black: Emily Finn, radiant in a shimmering gown, twirling in the arms of Austin Lynch, his smile wide as he lifts her off the dance floor like she’s weightless. It was May 2025 at Sayville High School’s senior gala – three years into a high school romance that seemed scripted for a rom-com. Emily, the bubbly ballet prodigy with dreams of teaching dance to kids just like her, and Austin, the all-American kid who’d just enlisted in the Marines, bound for Parris Island boot camp in February.

By Thanksgiving, that fairy tale had curdled into a nightmare.

On November 26, 2025 – one day shy of his 18th birthday – Austin Lynch, 17, allegedly loaded exactly two shells into his legally owned shotgun, lured his ex-girlfriend to his family’s quiet colonial on Shenandoah Boulevard North, and blasted her in the head at point-blank range. Emily, 18, a SUNY Oneonta freshman home for the holiday, crumpled lifeless in the foyer, her backpack still slung over one shoulder, stuffed with his old hoodies she’d come to return. Lynch then jammed the barrel under his chin and pulled the trigger, mangling his face in a spray of blood and bone. He survived. She didn’t.

But the real horror wasn’t the shots that rang out around 11:10 a.m., shattering the crisp autumn air as Lynch’s parents scrubbed algae from their backyard hot tub. It was what Austin had typed into his phone the night before – a venomous manifesto that Suffolk County prosecutors unsealed Thursday, painting a portrait of obsession spiraling into calculated rage.

“I have set my mind on leaving this place before my 18th birthday,” Lynch scrawled in a Notes app entry timestamped 1:47 a.m. on November 25. “She thinks she can just walk away like I’m nothing? I f**king hate her. This ends tomorrow. Two shots. One for her lies, one for mine.”

The “her” was Emily, who’d blocked him two weeks earlier after a three-year relationship imploded under the weight of distance and doubt. What Lynch didn’t know – and what chilled Assistant District Attorney Dena Rizopoulos to her core during Thursday’s arraignment – was that Emily had screenshotted every threat, every late-night rant, and forwarded them to a campus counselor at SUNY Oneonta. “She was scared, but she was smart,” Rizopoulos told Acting Supreme Court Justice Philip Goglas, her voice steady but eyes flashing. “The victim told a friend, ‘He’s not letting go. I need to end this clean, or he’ll make it ugly.’ She had no idea how right she was.”

The unraveling started in August, when Emily jetted off to Oneonta’s rolling hills for her freshman year, majoring in childhood education with a dance minor. She was the girl who lit up American Ballet Studio in Bayport with her pirouettes, the one whose Instagram (@emily_finn1015) overflowed with clips of her in pointe shoes, captioned “Dancing through the chaos.” Austin stayed behind in Nesconset, trading cap-and-gown for a Marine recruiter’s handshake. “He was so proud,” a family friend whispered to reporters outside Riverhead’s Suffolk County Court. “Posted that enlistment photo with the caption ‘Semper Fi, future Devil Dog.’ But Emily going away? It broke him.”

Friends say the cracks appeared fast. Lynch drove the four hours to Oneonta unannounced twice in the fall – once in September, showing up at her dorm with wilting roses and a forced grin; again on Halloween, when a “surprise visit” devolved into a screaming match in the quad over her “ignoring” his texts. “You’re mine, Em,” he’d allegedly snarled, loud enough for her roommate to overhear. “College doesn’t change that.” Emily confided in her best friend, sophomore psych major Sarah Kline, that his possessiveness had turned stalkerish: tracking her Snapchat locations, bombarding her with 47 messages in one night accusing her of “hooking up with frat boys.”

By November 9, she’d had enough. Over a shaky FaceTime from her dorm bunk bed, Emily ended it. “Austin, we’re kids playing house. I need space to grow,” she typed in a follow-up text he screenshotted and seethed over. She blocked him on everything – Instagram, Snapchat, even Venmo, where he’d been sending “gifts” like $5 Starbucks cards with notes like “Miss you, babe. Come back.” Lynch spiraled. That weekend, he called Sarah in a drunken haze: “I’ll be dead by Wednesday if she doesn’t unblock me. Tell her I’m sorry… but I’m not.”

Emily, ever the fixer, planned one last meetup for closure. Home for Thanksgiving, she texted him from her mom’s West Sayville kitchen on November 25: “Tomorrow at 11? I’ll bring your stuff. Let’s just talk and move on. Please be civil.” Lynch replied with a thumbs-up emoji, but by 11 p.m., his phone lit up with rage. He paced his bedroom – the same one plastered with their prom pics and a framed shot of them at Jones Beach, arms tangled in the surf – muttering to himself as recorded by his phone’s voice memo app. “She’ll see. She’ll beg me back when it’s too late.”

Prosecutors say he’d prepped the shotgun days earlier, a 12-gauge his dad kept locked in a bedroom safe for trap-shooting trips. Lynch knew the code. He loaded two rounds at dawn on the 26th, hid it behind the couch, and waited. Emily arrived right on time, knocking softly in her UGG boots and a SUNY hoodie, backpack zipped tight. His parents, oblivious in the yard, heard the door creak, then muffled voices – hers pleading, “Austin, stop yelling” – before the blasts.

The first shell tore through Emily’s skull at close range, exit wound blooming across the foyer’s hardwood like a grotesque flower. She dropped instantly, eyes wide in shock, phone tumbling from her hand mid-text to Sarah: “Here. Pray for me.” Lynch, trembling, pumped the action and fired upward into his own face, shattering his jaw and cheekbone. He collapsed beside her in a pooling crimson, gurgling through the wreckage.

His father burst in first, shotgun smoke still curling, and screamed for his wife to dial 911. “My son… he shot her! Oh God, Emily!” The call transcript, leaked to local outlets, captures the panic: sirens wailing within minutes, Emily pronounced at 11:17 a.m., Austin airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital in critical condition.

Thursday’s arraignment was theater from hell. Lynch, now 18 and charged as an adult with second-degree murder, shuffled into court in green scrubs, face swaddled in bandages from forehead to chin, eyes hollow slits peering through. He pleaded not guilty in a raspy whisper, his attorney William Wexler pleading for bail: “He’s a kid with a future in the Corps. This was a cry for help gone wrong.” Rizopoulos fired back: “A cry for help doesn’t load two shells and stalk a girl for weeks. He premeditated this to punish her for leaving.”

The gallery erupted – Emily’s mom, Cliantha Finn, 48, a part-time dance instructor, sobbing into a pink ribbon pinned with her daughter’s senior photo; aunts clutching tissues; Sarah Kline glaring daggers. “Monster,” someone hissed as bail was denied, Lynch remanded to Riverhead Correctional amid jeers.

Emily’s light has dimmed Sayville forever. Vigils dot the ballet studio’s windows with pointe shoes tied in bows; her GoFundMe has surged past $120,000, funding a scholarship for aspiring dancers. The Sayville Alumni Association called her “a brightest light extinguished too soon,” while the Uvalde Foundation planted a memorial oak in the Finger Lakes National Forest: “For Emily – dancing in peace.”

Austin’s side? A ghost town. His Marine recruiters pulled his slot; family friends whisper of a “good boy” twisted by rejection. But those screenshots on Emily’s phone – timestamps matching his manifesto, plus deleted DMs like “If I can’t have you, no one will” – seal his fate. As he recovers in a cell, facing 25-to-life, one question lingers: In a world of puppy love and prom nights, how does “I hate her” become two fatal shots?

Long Island buries its daughter today. And somewhere, in the silence of a bandaged boy’s cell, the echo of that manifesto reminds us: Obsession doesn’t fade. It reloads.