As the family of Bianca Devins continues to mourn her death, her grieving stepmother is begging the public to stop sharing photos of the teen’s murder online.
On Monday, just one day after Devins was allegedly fatally stabbed by a man she’d met on Instagram — who then posted images of her body on social media — Kaleigh Nicole expressed her outrage on Facebook.
“It is absolutely disgusting that people are sharing, screenshotting the pictures of Bianca’s tragedic death!! WTF is wrong with you people!!??” Nicole wrote.
“I have seen the pictures. I will FOREVER have those images in my mind when I think of her. When I close my eyes, those images haunt me,” she added.
Nicole continued, “How about we have some f—— consideration for her Mother, Sister, Step sisters and brother, Step Mother and Step Father, her Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Nieces and Newphews and her friends. How about we have some f—— consideration FOR HER!!!”
Nicole went on to explain that seeing the images was especially hard on Devins’ loved ones.
“Imagine sitting there, in disbelief and praying to God that this is all some mistake and that your baby will walk through the door any minute. Now imagine seeing those pictures and having everything in you break. Imagine not even being able to yell out and scream or cry because your soul has now just been broken,” she wrote.
Nicole is urging social media users to report the photos and to instead post “what a beautiful young woman she was.”
“Bianca was a lot of things to so many people. She was young and beautiful and so full of live ,” Nicole wrote.
She shared that Bianca had overcome many obstacles before her shocking death.
“She had been through hell and back, conquering her own mental illness and she won. She was getting better. Fighting everyday,” Nicole added.
“She was happy. She had just graduated. She wanted to continue her schooling so that she could help people, like her, whom no one else wanted to help. She was so loved and it breaks out hearts not knowing if she ever realized just how loved she was,” Nicole continued.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Liv (@livdevins) on Jul 14, 2019 at 12:08pm PDT
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Nicole’s message comes after Devins’ sister Olivia paid tribute to the victim in an Instagram post.
“I hate knowing you’re not going to ever come back home,” she wrote. “You were the best sister anyone could’ve asked for. Thank you for always being there for me. Thank you for being the best sister I could ever imagine.”
In a statement released through a publicist, Devins’ family described her as “a talented artist, a loving sister, daughter, and cousin, and a wonderful young girl, taken from us all too soon. She is now looking down on us, as she joins her cat, Belle, in heaven. Bianca’s smile brightened our lives. She will always be remembered as our Princess.”
The tragedy fed the hashtag #RIPBianca and fueled online outrage about the images that showed up and were shared on Discord, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Early Sunday, the suspect, Brandon Clark, placed a 911 call and then stabbed himself in the neck as officers moved in on him after he laid down atop her body, which was under a green tarp on the ground outside of a parked SUV on a dead-end street in Utica, New York, police allege.
As officers watched, Clark, 21, then pulled out a cell phone and “took self-photographs of himself laying across the deceased female,” police allege.
Authorities disarmed Clark and after a struggle took him into custody and to a hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery for “severe” injuries from which he is expected to survive, according to Utica police.
Clark was charged with second-degree murder. Police said that in his 911 call, he had “made incriminating statements with respect to the homicide.”
Police initially were alerted at around 7:20 a.m. on Sunday by numerous calls to Oneida County dispatch “informing them that a male individual had posted to a social media site that he had killed his girlfriend, and was threatening to harm himself,” according to a news release from Utica police.
In his own 911 call, the male “was alluding the fact that he was going to harm himself.”
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Police traced that call to the dead-end Poe Street that ends near a wooded area, where the first arriving officer saw the black SUV with the male lying on the ground beside it. The man began to stab himself in the neck with a knife as the officer approached, then got up and laid down across a green tarp “some distance away,” police said.
Investigators later learned the two had met two months earlier on Instagram and developed a “personally intimate” relationship, spending time together and getting to know each others’ families.
Before the murder, the pair drove together to a concert in New York City on Saturday, leaving for the drive back to Utica sometime after 10 p.m. after “some sort of argument,” police said.
Back in Utica in the early hours of Sunday, that argument escalated with the vehicle parked at the Poe Street location “until the male produced a large, black handled knife, and used this to inflict the injuries that caused death,” police allege.
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That’s when Clark allegedly “took and distributed photographs of the killing on the Discord platform,” police said. “Members of Discord then viewed the images and posts and contacted the Utica police department. We can confirm that the images distributed of both the victim and the offender’s injuries are authentic and occurred at the time of the incident.”
“I’m sorry Bianca,” read the caption that accompanied a since-deleted photograph of Devins’ body posted on Sunday to Clark’s Instagram account, reports The New York Times.
By Monday afternoon, Instagram had removed Clark’s account, but not before his profile was updated to read “10/06/1997 — 7/14/19. Just know that I feel no pain now.”
An attorney who might speak on Clark’s behalf was not immediately identified.
from PEOPLE.com https://ift.tt/32yiKw4
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