They were supposed to be the couple that survived distance. Emily Finn and Austin Lynch: Sayville High’s golden pair, voted “Most Likely to Get Married” in the yearbook, the ones who slow-danced to Morgan Wallen at senior sunrise while everyone filmed it like a movie ending.

Instead, on the day after Thanksgiving 2025, Austin turned their love story into a horror film with a 12-gauge shotgun and a 47-page digital diary titled simply “EMILY.”

Suffolk County detectives found the diary buried in a hidden folder on Lynch’s MacBook when they executed the search warrant at his blood-soaked Nesconset home. Page after page is a descent into madness, written between September 1 and November 25, each entry timestamped like a countdown.

September 3: “She posted a picture with some Oneonta lacrosse guy. Caption was ‘new friends.’ I threw up in the recruiter’s office bathroom.”

October 31 (after the Halloween fight on campus): “She told me I embarrassed her in front of her new friends. Embarrassed HER? I drove four hours with roses. I’m done being the joke.”

November 9 (the night she dumped him): “She said ‘I’m not the same girl you knew in high school.’ Good. Because I’m not the same guy either.”

November 21 (final phone call): “She called me toxic. Said she was scared of me. I laughed and told her she should be.”

The last entry, written at 3:14 a.m. the morning of the murder, is only eight words long:

“Tomorrow she comes to say goodbye. She never will.”

That diary is now Exhibit A in the People v. Austin Amos Lynch, the case that has torn Long Island’s South Shore apart.

Emily Grace Finn, 18, had come home from SUNY Oneonta for Thanksgiving break with a single goal: give Austin his stuff back and walk away clean. She told her mom, Cliantha, over pumpkin pie the night before, “I just want him to see I’m okay without him. Maybe then he’ll let go.” She even rehearsed the conversation with her best friend Sarah in the car on the way over: “Fifteen minutes, in and out. I’ll leave his hoodie on the porch if he gets weird.”

Austin had other plans.

He’d spent the previous 48 hours rehearsing too, but his rehearsal was in the basement. Neighbors later told police they heard the unmistakable ka-chunk of a pump-action shotgun at least a dozen times on Monday and Tuesday. Austin’s father thought he was just “cleaning guns for hunting season.” He never checked.

Wednesday, November 26, 11:03 a.m. Emily pulled her white Jeep into the driveway of the Lynch family home on Shenandoah Boulevard North. She was wearing the same gray SUNY hoodie she’d worn the day she moved into college, the one Austin used to steal and sleep in when she was gone. She texted Sarah one last time:

here. wish me luck ❤️

Sarah replied instantly: “If he says anything creepy, leave. I’m on standby.”

Emily never saw the reply.

Austin met her at the door calm, almost sweet. He took the backpack, thanked her for coming, asked if she wanted water. Emily stepped inside the foyer to “keep it polite.” That was the last decision she ever made.

Security cameras from the Ring doorbell (recovered by forensics) show the front door closing at 11:06:42. At 11:09:18 the microphone picks up Emily’s voice, rising in panic: “Austin, put it down, please. You’re scaring me.” At 11:09:31 a single shotgun blast. At 11:09:37 a second.

Austin’s parents were twenty feet away in the backyard, winterizing the hot tub. The first blast sounded like a transformer blowing. The second made them drop their chemicals and run. They found Emily on her back in the entryway, most of her head gone, blood pooling into the grout lines of the tile. Austin was on his knees beside her, the shotgun still smoking, half his face a red ruin. He was trying to speak through the wreckage of his jaw, gurgling the same three words over and over:

“I’m sorry, Em… I’m sorry…”

Paramedics later said he kept repeating it all the way to the trauma bay.

He survived. Multiple reconstructive surgeries have rebuilt his face into something that vaguely resembles the boy in the prom photos, but the eyes are dead. When detectives read him the diary in the hospital on December 2, shackled to the bed with a breathing tube, he reportedly started sobbing so hard the monitors screamed.

Emily’s phone, found under her body, had one unsent text drafted to her mom at 11:09:29, nine seconds before the shot:

mom i think he has a g

It never went through.

At Thursday’s arraignment, Lynch, now 18, appeared via video link from Stony Brook University Hospital in green scrubs and a face wrapped like a mummy. He could barely mouth the words “not guilty,” but his attorney did it for him. The judge didn’t hesitate: remanded without bail. Next court date: Valentine’s Day 2026.

Outside the courthouse, Emily’s father, Chris Finn, a quiet Sayville firefighter, stood on the steps clutching one of her old pointe shoes. He didn’t scream. He didn’t cry. He just read from the last page of Austin’s diary that prosecutors had released to the family:

“If I can’t have her, I’ll make sure no one else ever does. Then we’ll be together the only way left, forever.”

Chris looked up at the cameras and said, voice cracking but clear:

“She came to give him closure. He gave her eternity.”

Tonight, the marquee at Sayville’s historic movie theater is dark except for eight words glowing in white:

For Emily Finn Keep dancing, beautiful. We love you.

And somewhere in a guarded hospital room, a boy who once promised her forever is learning what forever actually costs.