Nebraska Teenager Uses Senior Pictures to Honor Father Killed in Afghanistan

With the 2019-2020 school year on the horizon, students all over the area are preparing to head back to class. Part of the preparation for the upcoming school year includes making plans to have your senior pictures taken if you'll be graduating from high school next spring.

That leads us to a teenage girl from Nebraska, who has arranged to have a very unique set of senior class portraits taken to help honor her late father who died while fighting in Afghanistan eleven years ago.

KSFY TV is reporting Aurora, Nebraska High School senior Julia Yllescas main goal with her senior pictures was to have her late father be part of the photo shoot in some way.

Back in 2008, her father, Army Captain Robert Yllescas was injured by an IED and flown to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where he died a month later as a result of his injuries. He was then buried in Osceola, Nebraska.

According to KSFY, on Saturday, (August 17) Yllescas had her senior pictures taken, she then reached out to the photographer to see if there was some way possible to have the image of her late father somehow edited into the shots with her?

Yllescas desperately wanted to keep a piece of her father's memory through her last year of high school. Having these special senior portraits taken would do just that.

KSFY reports, as luck would have it, the photographer, Susanne Beckmann, just happened to be an active duty military wife herself and was honored to take the photos and attempt the task.

So far, Beckmann has sent Yllescas two separate photos. One that shows her sitting and one that depicts her standing next to a faint shadow of her father in uniform.

Having these very special senior class pictures will always ensure Yllescas will never be without her father.

As Yllescas said, "Just to have that on my wall and be like, 'No he is with me, even though I can't physically see him."

Source: KSFY TV