This tragic story underscores why your children should not have Internet access.
A nude Snapchat video that drove a teenage girl to kill herself was leaked by her boyfriend, according to published reports.
Levon Holton-Teamer told WFLA she sent her 15-year-old daughter, Tovonna Holton, to her clean up her room Sunday afternoon.
Minutes later, Holton-Teamer sensed something was wrong, and went looking for Tovanna. She found her daughter unresponsive on the bathroom floor with single gunshot wound to the head.
“I go to the bathroom; I couldn’t get in the bathroom. The bathroom light was off so I tried to get in and I looked down and I saw the puddle of blood. I tried to apply the pressure, the pressure to her head. I tried to save her,” Holton-Teamer said Wednesday.
Holton-Teamer said Tovanna had taken the gun from her purse.
She said her daughter was distressed over some pictures of her that were circulating on the Internet.
“Tovonna would say, ‘Mommy, I owe them; I owe them’. I said, ‘What do you mean you owe them?’ I couldn’t understand what was wrong,” Holton-Teamer said.
Hours after Tovanna died, her aunt, Angel Scott, took to Facebook.com to try and find out the source of the photos.
“I just said, ‘If anybody knows anything, what happened? Have you heard of anything? Do you know who these kids are who have the pictures?’ I thought it was just pictures and then the kids started inboxing me,” said Scott. She said she learned it was actually a nude video that was taken of the girl while she was in the shower.
“Everybody was out there talking about her and calling her names and they said it went up on social media, Snapchat,” Said Scott. “I’d never heard of that before about 3 something that afternoon,” she said.
A friend told a news weblog that Tovonna’s ex-boyfriend posted the nude video on Twitter after they broke up.
Christian Coyle-Watts said Tovanna and her boyfriend broke up Sunday morning. Hours later, she would be dead.
“Tovonna knew [her friend] posted the video, but Tovonna’s boyfriend posted it, trying to expose her in a derogatory way,” Coyle-Watts said. “He did it just because he knew he could, and it would hurt her feelings.”
The Pasco County School District learned about the online bullying and notified the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.
By Thursday afternoon, Tovonna’s picture had been shared thousands of times on Twitter.com and Facebook with the hashtag #stopbullying.
“I want them to pay, to feel what we feeling, even if their child is convicted or in trouble they can go visit their child,” Scott said.
