Brandy’s sister, Jackie, says the teen had always been mercilessly bullied online for her weight, but the cyberbullying eventually gained more momentum. “People would make up fake Facebook accounts and they would message her and she wouldn’t respond and they would still come at her,” Jackie said. “They would say really, really mean things like, ‘Why are you still here?’ They would call her fat and ugly. She was beautiful, absolutely beautiful; the only thing people could find to pick on her was her weight.”

Jackie says her sister changed her phone number and reported the bullying to police, but was told they couldn’t help her. Brandy also reported these instances of harassment to her high school, but the investigations led to nowhere. “They couldn’t do anything because [the suspects] used an app and it wasn’t traceable and they couldn’t do something until something happened, like they fight,” Jackie said.

Even when the Facebook pages were deleted after they reported them, it was just a matter of days before a new one was created. The profiles had Brandy’s name and photo and said she would “offer sex for free,” Jackie says.

 

“They would say, ‘I’m a slut and I’m a hoe. Anybody hit me up,’ ” Jackie explains. “It also had her phone number, so she would get text messages and phone calls all the time. It kept her up at night.”

Death

Brandy Vela sent a cryptic message to her sister one night, and her sister raced home with their mother and father to see what was going on. As soon as they arrived, they found Brandy with a gun pointed towards her chest crying and apologising for what she was about to do. The family tried to convince Brandy to put the gun down to no avail. Brandy was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Memorial Gone Wrong

While the family grieved their loss, they say bogus Facebook accounts of the high school senior continued to crop up online. One of the profiles showed guns on a photo of her, while another had a picture of the teen, who was bullied for her weight, as a pig.

“Two days after her funeral, somebody opened up a social media page in her name,” father Paul Vela said. “And people thought the family did it, so it started with people putting sincere condolences. After a few minutes, either four people or the same person posting four times said some things harassing Brandy about being a big fat cow, writing ‘you finally did it’ with a picture of a gun, writing ‘you’re a coward,’ ‘you should have done this a long time ago,’ some really horrific things.”

One of the posts shows a smiling Brandy with the words “my face when you shoot yourself in front of your family.” Another post showed a stick figure holding a gun with the words, “oops am I dead?”

The pages were removed after the family complained to Facebook, but authorities have not been able to determine who was behind the bullying.

I thought of this as a sightings post, because we came across commenting trolls while reading about online memorials. This is an extreme example of that where a person connected to the deceased bullied a girl to the point where she committed suicide and continued to harass the family on the online memorial sites.

Aftermath

Several months later, justice was served. After intense investigation into this cyber crime, police arrested two possible perpetrators. Police say 21-year-old Andres Arturo Villagomez and 22-year-old Karinthya Sanchez Romero, both of Galveston, were behind the harassment. Villagomez was allegedly the ex-boyfriend of Brandy. Sanchez Romero was his new girlfriend.

Hassan, Carma. “Bullied Teen Kills Herself in Front of Family.” CNN. Cable News Network, 01 Dec. 2016. Web.

Keating, Caitlin. “Teen’s Family Reveals the Intense Bullying Before Her Suicide in Front of Them: ‘It Was Stalking’.” PEOPLE.com. Time Inc, 14 Dec. 2016. Web.

POST, JACKIE SALO NY. “Bully Victim Brandy Vela Is Still Be Trolled Online after Shooting Herself.” The Sun. The Sun, 14 Dec. 2016. Web.