ALERT: Parents of Dead Teen Find Clues to Her Suicide On Bedroom Wall – It’s a Deadly Game and It’s Spreading

ALERT: Parents of Dead Teen Find Clues to Her Suicide On Bedroom Wall – It’s a Deadly Game and It’s Spreading

Teenagers today grow up on the Internet and social media — it’s become an inevitable fact of life. But that doesn’t mean that either are necessarily safe. Many teenagers are bullied online, are pressured into sharing explicit photos of themselves and some even commit suicide. One Atlanta teenager killed herself and her distraught parents were able to track her death back to a twisted online suicide game.

The 16 year-old girl, referred to as “Nadia,” was an artist. And shortly before her death, she put up paintings of blue whale skeletons that covered the wall by her bed. At first, her parents didn’t think much of it. But after she died, her brother began looking through her things and found more and more sketches and photos of whales.

He also found a sketch of a girl with a name written beneath it in Russian. When he searched the name online, he found that the name belonged to 17 year-old Rina Palenkova, who committed suicide in 2015. A photo of Rina had gone viral with the caption “goodbye.” This viral photo “led to the discovery of her supposed involvement with something online called Blue Whale.” And that caught Nadia’s brother’s attention. He remembered all of the blue whales in her room and became concerned. He eventually discovered the “Blue Whale Challenge.”

Blue Whale is supposedly a 50-day challenge in which “administrators” give participants a variety of tasks to complete. Some of them are seemingly benign, like waking up early or watching horror movies, but the tasks progress to more and more dangerous things, like self-mutilation. The last task is reportedly suicide. Deaths have been reported in Central Asia, Europe and South America, but Nadia’s death is thought to be the first in the United States.

In May of 2017, 21 year-old Philipp Budeikin was arrested for creating the Blue Whale Challenge and is being held on charges of “inciting at least 16 schoolgirls to kill themselves by taking part in a game he invented called Blue Whale.” He “confessed to the crimes, says he thinks his victims were just ‘biological waste’ and told police that they were ‘happy to die’ and that he was ‘cleansing society’.

“None of us knew about the Blue Whale game. I spend a lot of time online and hadn’t come across it until it happened,” Nadia’s brother said. He had found journal entries from Nadia in which she wrote “I am a blue whale,” as well as photos of challenges she may have completed.

Nadia, who is Bulgarian, also taught herself Russian so she could participate — even though no one in her family speaks the language. Her family now hopes to bring greater awareness to the game. “She wrote some of this stuff right in front of her teachers. Right around her friends. This is a thing that is happening, so people should know, especially parents that have kids that could potentially be subjected to the same thing and also to ask for help,” her brother said.

Nadia’s mother agreed. “I never had problems with my teenage girl, and I never thought that this was something that could happen to us.”

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