Naika Venant: Miami Teen Watched By Hundreds As She Kills Herself During Facebook Live Stream


A distraught Florida teenager has become the third person in a month to broadcast her own suicide during a Facebook Live session.

Fourteen-year-old Naika Venant was said to have followed an hour-long video stream by molding a noose out of a scarf and hanging herself inside of the bathroom of her Miami Gardens foster home as more than 1,000 of her Facebook friends looked on, the Miami Herald explains.

Venant’s lifeless body then reportedly dangled for about an hour or so from a handle of a shower door, all while still being captured by the video feed, as observers purportedly continued to watch and mock the girl, going as far as to recreate scenes of the deceased teen’s final act on their social media pages. The video was rumored to have locked itself on the teen’s profile for two more hours before employees of Facebook finally answered replies to have it removed.

“It was just disgusting,” an online friend of Naika’s, Antonio Gethers, relayed about their reactions.

Making matters even worse, mishaps related to the location of Venant’s residence deterred authorities from possibly reaching the suicidal teen in time. The New York Daily News states that another of Naika Venant’s Facebook followers were the first to call the Miami-Dade Police Department to notify them of the incident, but accidentally gave law enforcement the wrong address.

Once officers arrived at the first home, the occupants, who knew of Naika and her family, were able to send them to the home of the teenager’s foster parents, but she was pronounced dead not too long after being transported to nearby Jackson North Hospital. Venant’s guardians purportedly slept through the entire ordeal without ever knowing what their foster daughter was up to just steps away from their bedroom.

During a press conference with her lawyers, Naika’s birth mother, Gina Alexis, tearfully expressed her pain over permanently losing the child she was forced to give up seven years ago.

“I am sick and devastated,” she said, “I trusted [the] Florida [Department of Children & Families] care for my baby.”

“Instead,” Ms. Alexis continued, “she kills herself on Facebook. I have to bury my baby.”

Following her comments, Harold Talenfeld, Ms. Alexis’ counsel, revealed to reporters that at some point in recent history, Naika reached out to her mother to share that she had been sexually and physically assaulted by a former foster family member, a 14-year-old boy. As such, the young girl ended up having to be treated for a urinary tract infection, and was removed from the home by DCF sometime thereafter.

Since spring of last year, Talenfeld says that at least 10 foster care centers and homes had welcomed and released Naika Venant from their care without any notice given to Ms. Alexis as to why. An investigation into the matter is ongoing, so says a spokesperson for the state’s DCF organization.

On Monday, aspiring entertainer Frederick Jay Bowdy also ended his life during a Facebook Live stream just days after being arrested for allegedly participating in a sex crime, as noted by the Inquisitr. Similar to the Naika Venant incident, many viewers first believed that the actor was simply faking the moment to gain attention, before the 33-year-old Prepper player shot himself in the head while sitting in his car. Facebook eventually deleted the video of the gruesome occurrence a few hours after a copy of the live stream solidified on Bowdy’s profile page.

Both instances follow that of 12-year-old Katelyn Nicole Davis of Cedartown, Georgia, who also committed suicide for a social media audience on December 30. Unlike Bowdy and Naika Venant, however, the preteen Davis was said to have set up the video stream over on another website, Live.me, before it was posted over to Facebook by several people, according to the Miami Herald. Just as with Naika, Katelyn ultimately hung herself after first claiming that she had been sexually assaulted by a male family member.

[Featured Image by AzmanJaka/iStock]

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