Warning: This post may cause distress for some readers.
On Saturday night, Bianca Devins, 17, and her friend, Brandon Clark, 21, attended a concert in New York.
It was meant to be a fun night out.
A chance for the friends, who had met for the first time two months ago after chatting online, to see musician Nicole Dollanganger in Queens.
But Bianca Devins would never return home.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, horrifying images began to emerge on a server Clark frequented on Discord.
“Sorry f*ckers, you’re going to have to find somebody else to orbit,” Clark allegedly wrote alongside the photo on Discord. (Orbiting is often used to describe men who frequently engage with a woman’s social media accounts in the hopes of sleeping with them.)
He also shared the photo to his since-deleted Instagram account, writing, “I’m sorry Bianca”.
According to police reports, the photos showed Devins’ body covered in blood with wounds to her neck and throat.
When Devins’ online friend of three years, Chels, came across the photo on Sunday morning, she initially thought it was fake.
“I didn’t believe it [at first]. I thought it was a fake or a lookalike,” the 20-year-old told Rolling Stone.
“Then I started comparing her distinct facial features… after I realised, ‘Holy shit, this might be her.'”
After receiving multiple phone calls from concerned Discord users as well as a call from Clark himself, police attended the scene.
When they arrived at the scene, Devins was found by a car. She was dead.
As officers for the Utica Police Department held Clark at gunpoint, he continued to post to his Instagram Stories, allegedly sharing photos of himself laying across Bianca’s body.
The last message she sent was at 5.47am – less than two hours before police discovered her body.
On social media, many people have painted Clark as a lonely, obsessed fan of Devins, who worked as a model and an ‘e-girl’.
According to Buzzfeed, e-girls are young women who post about anime, video games and fashion online.
Although these reports haven’t yet been confirmed by police, some social media users have claimed that Clark may have killed Devins after she sexually rejected him, with some 4chan users likening Clark’s behaviour to that of University of California Santa Barbara shooter and ‘incel’ Elliot Rodger.
Just four months ago, video footage of the Christchurch massacre was shared widely on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
The platforms were heavily criticised for failing to swiftly remove the posts.
This week, the murder of an innocent person has gone viral once again.
On Sunday night, hours after police had arrested Clark, the photos of Bianca Devins were still available for the world to see on his Instagram page.
Once the images were eventually removed from Clark’s Instagram page, they continued to recirculate as platforms struggled to keep up.
On Instagram in particular, some users even began to capitalise on Devins’ death, promising to post non-existent video footage of her murder in exchange for “likes and follows”.
A young girl has been murdered and social media users have shared horrific images of her body, largely unpoliced, in pursuit of engagement.
When the murder of an innocent woman becomes internet fodder, we have a serious problem.
Top Comments
And this is the world created by this generation for the next generation. One through filters and fox ears and distance. Where we can hide behind a screen whilst behaving however we want with no consequence. This is not progress. This is a debasement of humanity.
It’s bad enough that the piece of crap who killed her put the pictures online, but what kind of revolting excuse for a human being would repost them and keep uploading them once they’ve been removed? Disgusting, arrogant, heartless pieces of shit.
Everything you just said I agree with 100% and also the fact that some people are trying to get more followers and likes by saying that they have a video of her murder just shows how much social media has become unsocial and disturbing!!