A family in Tampa expected to be celebrating the completion of 15-year-old Tovonna Holton’s freshman year at Wiregrass Ranch High School, but instead they’re preparing her funeral — and it’s all because of cyberbullying.
The teen used her mother’s handgun to take her own life this past Sunday after finding out that friends had allegedly filmed her taking a shower and posted it to Snapchat without her permission, according a report by Tampa news channel WFLA. “I said, ‘My baby! My baby!’” a visibly distraught Levon Holton-Teamer, Holton’s mother, recalled through tears in a video for WFLA. “I couldn’t get in the bathroom … so I tried to get in, and I look down. I seen a puddle of blood.” Holton-Teamer told the station that she tried to save her daughter by applying pressure to her head before dialing 911.
The grieving mother added that she had gone to the school repeatedly to report Holton’s ongoing bullying, but “wasn’t always satisfied with the responses she got.” She was thinking of pulling her daughter out of the school before Sunday’s tragedy occurred.
A more recent report by the Daily Beast claims that it was actually Holton’s ex-boyfriend who shared the nude video on Twitter in an act of revenge. Holton’s “longtime pal” Christian Coyle-Watts told the publication that the couple had broken up Sunday morning after a series of fights and that “Tovonna’s Snapchat recording was meant to be a “body appreciation” post before the ex-boyfriend allegedly published it.”
It’s unclear which report is correct, but WFLA says that the case is currently under investigation by the sheriff’s department.
Suicide due to cyberbullying is sadly not uncommon. “one of the largest global orgs for young people and social change” victims of bullying are two to nine times more likely to commit suicide than average kids, and almost 43 percent report they’ve been bullied online. Most shockingly, 90 percent of teens who have witnessed cyberbullying say they’ve simply ignored it.
The personal tales of teens who have killed themselves because of cyberbullying are almost too numerous to keep up with. This month, 15-year-old Shania Sechrist hanged herself in her Pennsylvania family home after being harassed on Facebook and through text messages. In January, David Molak, a high school sophomore in San Antonio committed suicide after being relentlessly bullied, primarily on Instagram and through texting. According to Heavy.com, the bullies were actually threatening to kill him. One message read, “We’re going to put him six feet under.” His tormenters were not prosecuted because of insufficient evidence.
Some of the most high-profile cases of teens committing suicide after being bullied online include Amanda Todd, who posted a now-famous video to YouTube about her abuse —most notably, a Facebook profile her tormentor created featuring a topless photo of her before hanging herself a month before her 16th birthday. Tyler Clementi was an 18-year-old student at Rutgers University when he jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2010. Clementi’s roommate had outed the teen as gay by secretly filming him kissing another man and posting it to Twitter.
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