A 12-year-old girl from Argentina was discovered dead inside her house after attempting the trending TikTok "blackout challenge" which she had been live streaming to her schoolmates.
According to her aunt Laura Luque, Milagros Soto was discovered dead in her bedroom by her father on Friday when he got home from work.
Luque said that one of her niece's classmates at School No. 223 Lieutenant General Pablo Riccieri in Capitán Bermudez, Santa Fe, sent her a WhatsApp message with a link to the TikTok dare, also known as the "choking challenge" or "pass-out challenge."
Soto tried three times to get rid of the rope around her neck but was unable on each occasion. Tragically, she passed away in front of her companions.
The upset aunt thinks that "someone encouraged" Soto to complete the disgusting challenge by admitting that her niece had been made fun of by students at her school.
"We have a lot of doubts about everything that happened. She was a very smart girl. She suffered a lot of bullying," Luque told TV station El Trece."She told us that nobody liked her at school because they said she looked pretty, because she was blonde and had light blue eyes."
"She was a happy person. unbelievable. An excellent niece, granddaughter, daughter," Luque said. "A very studious girl because we have nothing else to say because everyone here knew her as the girl who smiled with those big eyes."
According to a copy of the autopsy that the publication Clarin was able to get, Soto died from "mechanical asphyxia by hanging" and there were "no signs of abuse or third-party intervention."
Officials from School No. 223 Lieutenant General Pablo Riccieri made a statement in which they recalled Soto as "a great student, classmate, sweet, good and kind."
Authorities have found Soto's smartphone and are looking into whether any of the school's kids took part in the fatal challenge.
"We are in a society where if you don't do this you're not part of the group, if you don't do what we tell you, you're (worthless)," Luque said, as quoted by Clarín. "This is ongoing, it's being investigated, and I'm not going to stop until I know what happened to Milli. All I know is that she wouldn't have been able to take her own life."
In order to participate in the trending "blackout challenge," one must videotape themself holding their breath for as long as possible before passing out and then explain their experience in a separate video.
The challenge first appeared on TikTok in 2008, and according to People, it reappeared in 2021.
At least 80 fatalities have been linked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to social media users who accept the challenge.
In November 2020, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that during the previous 18 months, the challenge had claimed the lives of at least 15 children under the age of 12. During the same time period, five further deaths involving youngsters between the ages of 13 and 14 were documented.
