At 11:07 a.m. on the day before Thanksgiving, Emily Finn’s iPhone lit up with a message that would become the most heartbreaking screenshot in Suffolk County history.

Sophia ❤️ Emily: “Soph I’m scared. He’s crying and won’t let me leave. Tell my mom I love her and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. I just want to go home to my mom.”

Seven minutes later, the first 911 call came in: two gunshots, a girl screaming, then silence.

By the time police smashed through the side door of 17-year-old Austin Lynch’s split-level home on Southern Boulevard, Emily Finn – the 18-year-old SUNY Oneonta freshman who still had glittered with Nutcracker magic and marching-band sparkle – was bleeding out on the driveway, clutching her phone in one hand and Austin’s Marine Corps hoodie in the other.

Austin, her ex-boyfriend of three months, lay a few feet away with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the face. The .38 revolver – legally purchased by his father for home protection – was still warm beside him.

He survived. She did not.

What happened in those final seven minutes has shattered two families, a high school, and an entire community that is still trying to understand how a prom king and queen who once slow-danced to Ed Sheeran under fairy lights ended up in a murder-suicide attempt that reads like the darkest Greek tragedy.

According to detectives and the dozens of frantic texts recovered from Emily’s cracked iPhone, the morning started with the best of intentions.

Emily had driven from her parents’ house in West Sayville to return Austin’s belongings – clothes, letters, the stuffed bear he won for her at the 2024 Suffolk County Fair. She told her mother it would take “ten minutes tops.” She promised to be back in time to help peel potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner.

But when she arrived, Austin – reeling from a recent Marine Corps rejection letter and spiraling into depression and rage – refused to let her leave.

Texts recovered by police paint a terrifying timeline:

10:59 a.m. Emily → Sophia: “He’s begging me to give him another chance. I said no and he started crying.”

11:02 a.m. Emily → Sophia: “He just locked the front door. He says if I leave he’ll ‘do something stupid.’ Soph I’m actually scared.”

11:05 a.m. Emily → Sophia: “He went upstairs. I think he’s getting his dad’s gun. Please call someone.”

11:07 a.m. Emily → Sophia: “Tell my mom I love her and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. I just want to go home to my mom.”

That was the last message she ever sent.

Neighbors reported hearing Emily scream “Austin, please don’t!” followed by a single gunshot. A second shot rang out almost immediately after – Austin’s failed attempt to take his own life.

When officers arrived, they found Emily’s ballet-pink Converse sneakers still neatly lined up by the door, as if she’d only stepped inside for a moment. Her car sat in the driveway, engine still ticking as it cooled, driver’s door wide open.

She had made it halfway out before he shot her in the chest.

The image that has broken Long Island: Emily’s blood-soaked iPhone lying in the grass, the screen still glowing with the unsent text she was typing when the bullet hit:

“I’m trying to run—”

Austin, now in ICU at Stony Brook with his jaw wired shut and facing second-degree murder charges when (and if) he recovers, has reportedly told detectives through written notes: “I couldn’t live without her. So I made sure she couldn’t live without me.”

Emily’s mother, Cliantha Finn, a beloved third-grade teacher at Cherry Avenue Elementary, collapsed in the hospital corridor when shown her daughter’s final messages. “She warned us,” she whispered to detectives, clutching the phone like a lifeline. “We told her he was just sad. We told her to be kind. We never thought…” Her voice dissolved into the kind of keening that doesn’t stop.

At Sayville High School, where Emily and Austin were 2024 graduates, cancelled classes for the rest of the week. The football field – where Emily once played flute in the marching band and Austin wore number 88 – has become a makeshift memorial of pink balloons, pointe shoes, and handwritten letters that all say the same thing:

“We should have seen it.”

Emily’s dance coach, Melissa Ragona, posted a video of Emily’s final solo from The Nutcracker last Christmas – a flawless Sugar Plum Fairy variation – now viewed over 4 million times with the caption: “This is how the world should remember her. Not the way she left it.”

Austin’s family has barricaded themselves inside their home, blinds drawn, no statement. A single Marine Corps flag still flies at half-mast on their porch – the dream their son will never live now stained forever by the nightmare he created.

As Suffolk County DA Ray Tierney prepares charges and the community prepares to bury one of its brightest lights just days before what would have been her first college Thanksgiving break, Emily’s father Ryan stood outside the medical examiner’s office yesterday and spoke the words now carved into every heartbroken heart on Long Island:

“She went to return a hoodie. She never came home.”

And somewhere, in a hospital bed he doesn’t deserve to wake up in, Austin Lynch breathes through tubes while the girl who once loved him is lowered into the cold November ground wearing the pink dress she was supposed to wear to her cousin’s wedding next summer.

Because sometimes love doesn’t die with a broken heart.

Sometimes it kills with one.

Rest in peace, Emily Finn. The world was prettier when you were dancing in it.