15-year-old kills herself after nude Snapchat video circulates

Posted by / June 10th, 2016 / No responses

On Sunday afternoon, a 15-year-old freshmen at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Wesley Chapel, Florida, committed suicide after her friends, using Snapchat, recorded a nude video of her while she was in the shower. The teen’s mother Levon Holton-Teamer said that she had sent her daughter Tovonna to clean her room, but that when she went to check on her minutes later, she made a chilling discovery. “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,” a distraught Holton-Teamer told a local TV station on Wednesday. Tovonna had removed the gun from her mother’s purse and used it to fatally shoot herself. She died hours later.

Holton-Teamer said that earlier that day her daughter had told her she was worried about a nude photo her friends had taken of her without her permission. After Tovonna shot herself, her aunt, Angel Scott, took to Facebook in search of answers. “I just said, ‘If anybody knows anything, what happened?’ … I thought it was just pictures and then the kids started inboxing me. Everybody was out there talking about her and calling her names.”

Detectives from the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office are investigating the case, and Tovonna’s family say they intend to seek justice. “I want them to pay, to feel what we’re feeling. Even if their child is convicted or in trouble, they can go visit their child,” said Scott. A photo of Tovonna, together with the hashtag #stopbullying, is being shared by supporters of the family on social media in order to raise awareness to the traumatic outcomes that bullying can bring about.