A 15-year-old Florida girl committed suicide because bullies filmed a nude video of her and posted it to Snapchat, her family said Wednesday.
Tovonna Holton took a gun from her mother’s purse and fatally shot herself in a bathroom Sunday night at her family’s Tampa-area home, her relatives told WFLA-TV. Tovonna complained hours before her death about naked pictures her friends took of her without her permission, the family said.
“Tovonna would say, ‘Mommy, I owe them, I owe them.’” her mother Levon Holton-Teamer told the TV station. “I said, ‘What do you mean you owe them?’ I couldn’t understand what was wrong.”
The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office is investigating Holton’s death, but no suspects had been arrested Thursday. Tovonna’s aunt Angel Scott found out other teens had posted a nude video of Tovonna on the social media app Snapchat when Scott posted on Facebook about her niece’s death, she said.
“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,” Scott told the TV station. “Everybody was out there talking about her and calling her names, and they said it went up on social media, Snapchat. I’d never heard of that before about 3 something that afternoon.”
“I sent Tovonna to clean her room on Sunday night but found her dead minutes later, Holton-Teamer told WFLA.
“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,” she said, breaking into tears.
