We feel like we know this person but have never met her.

The comments about her say so much and we can’t help but think the world may be a little darker now without Amanda George in it.

In email correspondence with our friend Ken Robol, the former Halifax Community College instructor says, “Amanda was a great person to be around. Always happy, always filled with joy. It's just such a great loss to our area. She will be missed so much.”

The comments section of our website have received the most ever.

“My thoughts are with Amanda's family and friends. She had a great personality, could laugh during any situation and was a great friend. It was always great to see her and I feel that this world has lost someone who made it a little more brighter each day. Rest in peace Amanda.”

Another friend said: “If you knew Amanda well, you would have known a sweet, smiling and humble girl who never put herself above anyone else.”

Fitting comments and then, as things will happen in Roanoke Rapids, and probably elsewhere in a public forum, one person takes the ball on a misdirection play and changes the game.

That person was someone who called their self Citizen, who recognized the tragedy but said, “Just because her father is a well known man in Roanoke Rapids doesn’t make her any better than any other person who this has happened to.”

Ah, the negativity factor. The same factor we saw last week when so many people played Monday morning quarterback to the decision to bring Old Crow Medicine Show to the theater. The same negativity we saw by some people with the Main Street program and even from private comments about the decision by city council to allow Elizabeth Branham and Gil Cunningham to run the theater.

These are the same negative comments that lead many to call this city Rumor Rapids. We allowed citizen’s comments to stay. We did delete two because they contained perhaps the most vulgar word in the English language and by mistake we deleted two because we pushed the wrong button.

The past few weeks have not been stellar for us because of personal issues and we try to remain as upbeat as we can and we have never been eternal optimists and perhaps will never be.

We try to bite our tongues, however, and talk about negative things with our friends and not post them in public comment forums.

We believe it would be good medicine for some people in the Roanoke Valley to do. You know, if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything. There are people in this community who are trying to build up and not tear down and the voice of one negative person can stop that effort like a SWAT team.

There is nothing wrong with constructive criticism aired to the right people. We will continue to publish comments on our website as long as they aren’t libelous or contain vulgarities despite, perhaps, disagreeing with them.

We do believe if you write something you want to post, write it, reread it and think about it and reread it again because what almost became a way to remember Amanda George, became a defense arsenal for addressing citizen.

One thing you will notice we do differently at rrspin.com is we never describe people as prominent, a community leader or business leader. We do that for a reason because it’s often a judgment call and gives people more weight than they often deserve.

We try to put people on the same field and when we received a call Sunday morning that a local person had died in Charlotte, our only thought was to track the information and bring it to our readers as quickly as we could, which ended up being Monday morning. Sunday the report was not ready and we had trouble finding the right agency that investigated the crash.

We’re not asking people to just blindly accept things as they are, because we certainly don’t. We’re just asking people and ourselves, especially ourselves, to think before speaking or writing.

As comments continue to come in on Amanda George, we would ask that maybe those writing forget what citizen said and concentrate on remembering a 25-year-old woman whose life was taken from us too early — Editor.