The moment a mother found out her daughter died, while scrolling on Facebook.

On May 23 last year, 47-year-old mum of three Deborah Byrne was scrolling through her Facebook feed.

Deborah – from Northhampton – began to notice that there were memorial tributes posted to her 21-year-old daughter Brogan Warren.

One message said “gone too soon”, while another read, “I can’t believe the news”.

When a friend private messaged Deborah to share their condolences, the mother said “the penny dropped”.

"A friend of Brogan's wrote to me 'I'm so sorry' in a private message, so I asked what the hell she was talking about," Deborah told The Sun.

"She said there had been a horrific crash the night before, on May 22, and she would be there for me. That’s when I started screaming...Brogan was dead.

“At that moment my heart shattered.”

After gathering her family and sharing the news, Deborah said she frantically tried to contact police for more information.

"We were desperately trying to get hold of the Northamptonshire Police to get official confirmation of what had happened," she said.

"But because the crash had happened in Oxfordshire, 45 miles away, Brogan's name wasn't coming up on our local police's system.

I couldn't believe I'd found out about my daughter's death on Facebook."

Finally, at 1pm, an officer from Thames Valley Police confirmed that 21-year-old Brogan had died at 11:15pm the evening before, following a head-on collision.

Three of her friends - 23-year-old Sam Jones, Nicoletta Tocco, 25, and Sam Kay, 26 - had also died in the accident.

The group of friends had been travelling back from a vegan festival in Bristol when the crash occurred.

Deborah revealed she had gone to bed early that night, after receiving a text around 8pm from her daughter saying she was on her way home.

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"When I heard no more from Brogan, I wasn't worried. I assumed her phone battery had died and she'd stopped off at someone's house," she told The Sun.

Police say they knocked on Deborah's door around 5am to tell her the news, but were unable to wake her.

"I recall hearing the dog barking, but didn’t think anything of it," she said.

At Brogan's funeral, friends and family poured flowers and glitter onto her coffin.

"She was such a free-spirit, it's what she would have wanted," Deborah said.

"I never thought this would happen to our family. Brogan was such a lovely, kind girl and now we don't have her anymore and I've been left with so much pain."