Large Crowd of Mourners Drawn to Viewing for Lily Seegobin

Mourners poured into Van Hise and Callagan Funeral Home on Arnold Avenue Wednesday afternoon, with heavy hearts and questions that will probably never be answered.

Friends and family from the Shore region and from Rutgers University, where Lily was a freshman, filled three rooms at the funeral home within the first half hour of the visitation period for Lily Seegobin.

Teenage girls walked up to the open casket, paid their respects, and walked away sobbing.

The boys held it in, but the pain showed in their faces.

"I loved her," said Jack Kulesza, who graduated from Point Pleasant Borough High School with Lily last June. "She was one of my best friends for a long time."

"She was amazing," said Bill McCormack, another high school friend, who spoke outside the funeral home. "I loved her like a sister. I don't think we'll ever get over this."

"I feel so bad for Melissa," said Kulesza, looking over at McCormack. He said Melissa Peters, Lily's best friend, was inside the funeral home.

Seegobin, 19, drove her car onto NJ Transit train tracks in Spring Lake on Saturday night after s that she had reached "the point of no return."

Her father, her friends all keep asking the same question: why did someone who was loved by so many feel so hopeless?

The size of the crowd, the crying, the hugging, made it that much harder to fathom an answer.

The Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office, based on their investigation and the medical examiner's autopsy, on Monday.

Five young men who knew Lily from Rutgers-Newark parked across the street and walked toward the funeral home.

They knew Lily because they all lived in Woodward Hall, the freshman residence at Rutgers-Newark.

"We used to have breakfast together," said Jeremy Katz, 18, the hall president. "It's not easy for college kids to get up at 7:30 in the morning, but we did. I used to enjoy talking to her."

Katz said he had met Lily when they went through placement testing and quickly formed a friendship.

"She was always smiling," Katz said, as his friends next to him nodded and said "yeah."

"Even if she had a mountain of homework, she always had something positive to say," Katz said.

A eulogy will be held at 10:30 a.m. Thursday at the funeral home, followed by burial at Greenwood Cemetery in Brielle.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to help pay for an operation for a family member in Trinidad, where Lily was born.

Checks can be made payable to Jeffrey R. Surenian, 1206 Rue Ave., Point Pleasant, NJ 08742.