At 12 p.m. Sunday, an eager crowd of purple and white gathered at the Greenway Trail with anticipation as they prepared to run a 5k in support of Mallory Mayor.

Mallory Mayor, an App State student, was struck by a car while leaving a music festival last April in Boone. Mayor spent months in the Trauma Intensive Care Unit at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem. Most recently, she is back in her home doing outpatient rehab after having gone through rehabilitation at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mayor’s sorority, Sigma Kappa, hosted “Miles for Mallory” in partnership with Alpha Phi to raise money for her medical expenses.

Chapter President of Sigma Kappa, Kendall Lewis, is a senior communications sciences and disorders major. She said this accident has bonded the sorority greatly.

“When something like this happens, it really bonds people in a different sort of way,” Lewis said. “So then it’s kind of become, like, a family sort of feeling with, I mean, everyone in our sorority at this point.”

Lewis said the shock of the accident deeply resonated with Boone’s community.

“It had such a big impact because people were just dumbfounded by the fact that it could happen at a music festival when you’re just hanging out with your friends in college on some random Saturday night,” Lewis said.

Isabella Blanco, a senior exercise science major and vice president of panhellenic relations for Sigma Kappa, was the primary organizer for the race. She agreed that the shock of the incident had a grand impact on her.

“I literally was standing in line for Auntie Anne’s and I saw her ahead of me in line, and I was just like, ‘Guys, follow me, let’s go talk to Mallory,’ and I hugged her,” Blanco said. “I didn’t think about the fact that that would be the last time I was able to talk to her for a while. Like, truly it can happen in an instant just like that to anyone, so that really put a lot into perspective for me.”

Risley Smith, a senior communications sciences and disorders major and vice president of internal operations for Sigma Kappa, said having their sorority as a support system was an incredibly valuable outlet through recovery.

“It’s a support system of like 100 people, and I know that I could call any one of them,” Smith said. “It just feels so empowering to know that all like a hundred of us can come together and help her.”

Smith said what started as a sorority initiative turned into a town-wide movement.

“It was crazy how in our heads we were like, this is just something we’re dealing with, but every single person, adult, school-aged kid, college student, knew exactly what we were talking about, and was like, ‘I want to help, I want to support,’” Smith said. “That was just such a special feeling, like, no matter if it was a bar, restaurant, clothing store, everyone kind of knew the situation.”

Lewis said everyone in Boone is tightly knit, and when something happens to one person, it affects everyone. This sense of community in Boone can even be seen throughout the 5k participants, as it ranged from sorority and fraternity students to children and families.

Caroline Duffy, a junior accounting major and vice president of finance for Sigma Kappa, said having a 5k on the Greenway was very fitting for Mayor, since it was one of their favorite things to do as best friends.

“Our favorite thing to do when we hung out was literally just to go to the Greenway and walk around and yap for so long that we didn’t realize how far we walked,” Duffy said. “We’d be like, ‘Wait, where are we? We need to turn around, like I have class in an hour.’”

Duffy said the sorority reassured participants they do not have to actually run during the 5k, they are welcome to do it “Mallory style,” — walking and “yapping.”

“Mallory loves a good hot girl walk, Greenway walk, so it all perfectly meshed together,” Blanco said.

From the 5k alone, the two sororities raised $15,629 from 324 participants. Mayor’s GoFundMe has accumulated over $80,000 since April.

“She is the strongest, most resilient person that we know right now, no matter how many things have been thrown at her,”Blanco said. “It just shows that she has so much strength and that we all just need to be there to support her and her family during this time.”