An 18-year-old Miss Teen USA pageant competitor who overcame all odds — together with childhood homelessness and an abusive mom — to begin her personal charity group tragically died in a automobile crash on a Florida freeway Monday.
Kadance Fredericksen, the previous winner of the Miss Okaloosa County Teen USA title, was driving her sedan down Freeway 4 when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer, Florida Freeway Patrol stated Tuesday.
killed after a collision with a tractor-trailer in Florida. Baker Faculty
Fredericksen based “Kada’s Promise,” a charity initiative that offered teddy bears and blankets to kids in foster care, shelters for abuse survivors and hospitals and children with out a dwelling. Her compassion gained hearts throughout the nation in 2017 when she first began the initiative.
In 2019, she instructed WEAR Information that she took inspiration from her personal experiences as a homeless and abused baby. She was fortunately taken in by her father and adoptive mom later in life, serving to pave the best way for her charity and pageantry profession.
“Throughout many darkish occasions in my early childhood, the one factor that I might name my very own or that made me really feel secure was a single teddy bear that I obtained as a present. I carried him with me from home to deal with, sofa to sofa and clutched him tightly within the scariest occasions. It’s from these recollections that Kada’s Promise was born,” Fredericksen wrote on the Kada’s Promise web site.
By means of her time as a pageant queen, Fredericksen claimed the coveted title for her dwelling county. She additionally competed on quite a few ranges and even gained Little Miss Northwest Florida in 2017 and made it to the Miss Teen Florida competitors final yr.
Fredericksen was a senior at Baker Faculty, the place she was set to graduate within the coming months. She additionally deliberate to attend faculty and had been awarded a $40,000 scholarship to place in direction of the college of her alternative a mere week earlier than her premature loss of life.
Ever the giving soul, Fredericksen sought to raised others’ lives nonetheless she might. Along with beginning Kada’s Promise, she used her pageantry platform to lift $25,000 for the Ronald McDonald Home, which works in direction of offering non permanent housing for households with a toddler receiving medical therapy for ailments like most cancers.
“After I was little, I used to be abused and uncared for by my organic mom and stepfather. Throughout these occasions, the one factor I needed to name my very own was a stuffed animal I obtained as a present years beforehand. Now that I’m in a secure dwelling with a secure household, I discovered I wasn’t the one child that went by means of that,” Fredericksen instructed WCJB final yr.
Authorities are nonetheless investigating the reason for the crash. The 56-year-old tractor-trailer driver was not arrested and suffered minor accidents.
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