An 18-year-old Miss Teen USA pageant competitor who overcame all odds — including childhood homelessness and an abusive mother — to start her own charity organization died in a car crash on a Florida highway Monday.

Kadance Fredericksen, the former winner of the Miss Okaloosa County Teen USA title, was driving her sedan down Highway 4 when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer, the Florida Highway Patrol said Tuesday.

Fredericksen founded “Kada’s Promise,” a charity initiative that provided teddy bears and blankets to children in foster care, shelters for abuse survivors and hospitals and kids without a home. Her compassion won hearts across the nation in 2017 when she first started the initiative.

In 2019, she told WEAR News that she took inspiration from her own experiences as a homeless and abused child. She was taken in by her father and adoptive mother later in life, helping pave the way for her charity and pageantry career.

“During many dark times in my early childhood, the only thing that I could call my own or that made me feel safe was a single teddy bear that I received as a gift. I carried him with me from house to house, couch to couch and clutched him tightly in the scariest times. It is from these memories that Kada’s Promise was born,” Fredericksen wrote on the Kada’s Promise website. 

Through her time as a pageant queen, Fredericksen claimed the coveted title for her home county. She also competed on numerous levels and even won Little Miss Northwest Florida in 2017 and made it to the Miss Teen Florida competition last year.

Fredericksen was a senior at Baker School, where she was set to graduate in the coming months. She also planned to attend college and had been awarded a $40,000 scholarship to put toward the school of her choice a mere week before her untimely death.

Ever the giving soul, Fredericksen sought to better others’ lives however she could. In addition to starting Kada’s Promise, she used her pageantry platform to raise $25,000 for the Ronald McDonald House, which goes toward providing temporary housing for families with a child receiving medical treatment for diseases like cancer.

“When I was little, I was abused and neglected by my biological mother and stepfather. During those times, the only thing I had to call my own was a stuffed animal I received as a gift years beforehand. Now that I’m in a safe home with a safe family, I learned I wasn’t the only kid that went through that,” Fredericksen told WCJB last year.

Authorities are still investigating the cause of the crash. The 56-year-old tractor-trailer driver was not arrested and suffered minor injuries.