March 26, 2025 • 30 mins
In February 2021, 19-year-old Daisy De La O had a lot to be excited about: She’d recently started a new job, she’d saved up enough money to buy a car, and was on the verge of earning her associate’s degree. She dreamed of opening a makeup and tattoo business someday. But those dreams were shattered when she got a text message while watching T.V. with her family one night. She told them she’d be right back and stepped outside. It was the last time her family saw her alive.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
If you've ever scrolled through TikTok, then you know it's
full of people sharing the most intimate and sometimes the
most mundane parts of their lives. People who film everything
they ate in a day, everything they purchased on the internet,
everything they wore on vacation. People who see their lives
as content. Daisy dela Oh was not one of those people.
(00:25):
She was not an influencer, or a vlogger or a
content creator. She didn't like to share her secrets with
the world. Sometimes she even hid them from the people
closest to her. When she was murdered at the age
of nineteen, her Instagram contained just five posts, only two
of which showed her face. Slightly more than one hundred
(00:46):
people followed her. They were mostly friends from high school
and college, people she knew in real life. Nobody else
would have known to find her there. Her real name
wasn't even on the account to anyone outside of her
social circle. Her profile was essentially unsearchable. Her LinkedIn page,
created just six months before her death, listed no activity
(01:10):
and no connections, and her Facebook it seemingly hadn't been
touched in years. For the most part, Daisy lived her
life offline. And that was the way that she liked it.
But when her life was cut short in February of
twenty twenty one, a strange thing happened. Daisy went viral.
(01:34):
Photos and videos of her began to appear online, and
there was this one TikTok that really told the story
of her life and death. The first frame of it
showed Daisy on a carnival ride. It's the one where
you ripped the steering wheel and spin it around and
around in circles until you either puke or lose your
voice from screaming so much. Five words appear across the screen.
(01:58):
This is my friend Daisy. Daisy is wearing wingtip eyeliner
and a gold septum ring. She's got black and turquoise
hair peeking out from under her beanie. The neon lights
from a carnival cast this purple glow across her face.
And there's something about her expression. It's like, I don't
know the way she's looking off to the side, and
her eyes and her mouth are wide with joy that
(02:20):
is just really magnetic. A few seconds later, the TikTok
cuts to a new image, and this one has no
carnival ride, no smiles, no neon lighting, there's no joy.
It's it's mostly black, with a collage of photos of
someone else, someone suspected of murdering her. This TikTok it
(02:43):
was posted on May twenty six, twenty twenty one. It
was less than a minute long, but it accomplished two
things that nobody had been able to do up until
that point, not the media and not the police. It
got people to care about this woman they'd never met,
who came from an immigrant family and a low income neighborhood.
(03:04):
I've watched this TikTok over and over again. I've studied it,
like pausing the frames and zooming in and out and
analyzing it like it's this piece of art and I
don't know. It's not like I'm looking for some kind
of secret message within it. It's more that I'm just
in awe of its storytelling. It has this precision to it.
It hooks you in gut, punches you with a series
(03:26):
of emotions joy, horror, sadness, anger, and it conveys the
sense of urgency, this need for justice, not later, but
right now, and not from the authorities but from the community.
It gives us permission to look for answers to take control,
(03:46):
to be the sleuts we wish to see in the world.
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio by Heart Radio and
executive producer Paris Hilton. This is My Friend Daisy, Episode one,
Sitting Ducks. I would Never see.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
My daughter crowl Susanna Salas is broken. A mother grieving
her only daughter, Daisy de Lao.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If you lived in la in the summer of twenty
twenty one, you might have come across the story on
the local ABC seven station. It was the kind of
story that TV news shows seem to love to spotlight.
It was about a promising young girl, the senseless violence
that ended her life, and the single mother left shattered.
(04:48):
There were tearful interviews set to a slow piano instrumental.
The whole thing was deeply tragic, like unspeakably sad, but
the new segment also had this unexpected element.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
La County Sheriff's detectives tracked every lead, and Friends of
Daisy launched their own campaign on.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
TikTok, the TikTok campaign. It immediately piquked my interest. This
idea that TikTok a platform nobody outside of gen Z
seemed to understand and which the federal government wants to ban,
could actually lend a voice to the people who needed
it the most. And then there were the photos of
(05:29):
Daisy herself that drew me in. I didn't know her,
but she reminded me of myself and my friends in
high school. The piercings, the rainbow hair colors, the fishnet stockings.
She dressed like I did when I was a teenager,
when I didn't quite know who I was, but I
knew I wasn't like everyone else, or at least that's
(05:50):
what I told myself. And there was something I couldn't
get out of my mind when I first saw this new.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Segment Susannah grateful to the La County Sheriff's Department detectives
who vowed to hunt down Daisy's killer.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It was the way detectives had been celebrated in that
news clip. The narration was so over the top that
I almost wondered if it was a pr stunt for
the sheriffs. LA County homicide detectives worked endlessly on the case.
But as divine, I found it confusing because it raised
this question for me if that was true, if detectives
(06:27):
had been working endlessly on this case. Then, why did
Daisy's friends feel the need to get involved and try
to solve it themselves, to take matters into their own
hands and launch their own seemingly rogue campaign. I had
the sense that there was something missing from the story,
something that just couldn't be contained in this short news segment,
(06:48):
and I immediately wanted to know what it was. So
I got in touch with Susanna Saulis. We talked for hours,
and she told me about something one of the detectives
on the case had told her. It was something I'd
heard her talk about on that new segment. It. I
promised you me have We're going to find them. But
(07:09):
then she told me something that didn't make it onto
that TV segment, which is that the detective's words did
little to reassure her. When she heard them, she thought
to herself, bullshit, it's a Mexican American girl, who's going
to care about her? It turned out a lot of
people Daisy's friends made sure of it. I spent a
(07:30):
lot of time speaking with them in the months following
Daisy's murder. At that point, they hadn't been interviewed on
the news or by anyone at all. That I could tell.
I wanted to understand what had compelled them to become
their own detectives, to put their trauma on display for
the world. And it became clear pretty quickly that these
teenage girls hadn't made these tiktoks and Instagrams and Facebook
(07:53):
posts for clout. They definitely did not want to be
investigating their friends unsolved murder, but they well, they had
no other choice. And this thing they did it was
pretty gutsy, but it didn't exist in a vacuum. It
was part of this larger phenomenon of friends and loved
ones turning to social media when the so called justice
(08:15):
system wasn't working for them.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
I have never once met a family who said option
number one to help my family's case is to become
a content creator and try to become an influencer, not
once having met somebody where that was option A.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
That's Sarah Turney. She's a true crime TikToker, YouTuber and podcaster.
If you've ever spent time watching true crime on TikTok
or crime talk as it's sometimes called, then chances are
you've seen Sarah's videos. Talking to her over zoom felt
a little surreal. It was almost like jumping into one
of her videos to ask questions, questions like what would
(08:56):
compel someone to talk about their loved one's murder or
disappearance on social media to ask the public for help
in solving a case.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Usually, when people begin to tell their loved one stories,
it is their last resort.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
They don't know what else to do.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
You know, They've tried to go on the mainstream media
to get them to care, and their last resort is
making a podcast or a YouTube channel or a TikTok
because that's free and accessible to them.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
It's a last resort, Sarah told me, because it requires
a degree of vulnerability, which means it can also open
the door to harassment.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
We are sitting ducks for anybody to just pray on us.
We are asking the world, we are begging the world
to care about our loved ones, and that comes with
a lot of negativity.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Unfortunately, I first became aware of Sarah's videos when I
saw that someone had tagged her in the comments of
the my friend Daisy TikTok can you please help share this?
They'd written. Sarah didn't end up seeing the video. She
told me her notifications are always blowing up, so it's
easy for stuff to get married. People who make videos
(10:04):
about missing or murdered friends and loved ones, they often
tag Sarah, hoping that she'll repost them to her more
than a million TikTok followers. Sarah went viral in April
of twenty twenty. She'd made a TikTok about her sister's disappearance.
She'd tried for nearly two decades to get police to investigate,
but nothing worked until TikTok did.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I started TikTok to ask for gen Z's help to
share my missing sister Aliss attorney's story, and they are powerfull.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Four months after she posted the TikTok, the person she'd
been accusing of murder had officially been charged. It was
her father.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Today, I am announcing the grand jury indictment for secondary
murder of Michael Roy Turney.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
A jury later acquitted him. But Sarah's TikTok was like
this case study for others who desperately wanted to have
their day in court, to see charges filed, investigations closed,
and they knew they had a powerful resource at their disposal.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
The algorithm behind TikTok. You know it's been likened to
a slot machine in which you'll post a video and
chi ching, it goes viral. The next view may not,
and then again it goes viral. It's kind of addicting, right.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Sarah talks about TikTok as this democratizing tool, this thing
with the power to boost stories that aren't getting attention elsewhere.
Like all social media platforms, it also carries a risk
of circulating misinformation or just having it spin out of control.
But to people like Sarah, the risks are worth it.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I think that is why families gravitate towards TikTok. It
is the most even playing field out there in terms
of all these social media platforms.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I think that's one of the reasons why I got
so many responses to the article that I ended up
writing about Daisy for New York Magazines The Cut. Maybe
it was the fact that her story first surfaced on TikTok.
It was the story that otherwise might not have been
reported on by the local TV news or by me.
(12:21):
But after the article was published, I had this feeling.
It was sort of like that feeling I had when
I was watching that new segment, like this wasn't the
end of the story, there was still this part of
it that I hadn't uncovered yet, like what actually went
wrong during the police investigation? Why had it stalled? How
did it get to this point where Daisy's friends and
(12:41):
family felt the need to take it into their own hands.
And there were bigger questions I had too, like was
social media the only way to get attention on a
murder case when it involved someone who wasn't rich, or
who wasn't already kind of famous? What was the effect
this was having on the families of crime victims putting
(13:02):
themselves in the spotlight as a last resort. Was our
justice system fundamentally broken? In other words, how much depends
upon a TikTok? When I started making this series, I
had already interviewed people who created the posts about Daisy,
but I hadn't yet talked to those who had consumed them,
who sprang into action, who I would soon discover put
(13:24):
their own safety on the line and hunted for the
suspect in their own backyards. What compelled them to get involved?
I was interested in exploring this idea of vigilante justice.
Why did so many people in Daisy's community feel abandoned
by law? Enforcement, and where did their drive come from,
this drive to demand accountability by any means necessary. I
(13:47):
ended up sitting down with both detectives in person for
the first time. I spoke to lots of people who
knew Daisy, and I spoke to a lot of people
who had only ever seen her on their phone screens.
I sipped it through legal documents, and I gained access
to records I had never seen before, records that really
shifted my understanding of this case. And I ended up
(14:10):
speaking with the person whose photos I had seen all
over the internet, the person who, according to that TikTok,
had murdered Daisy. The last time any of Daisy's family
members saw her alive was February twenty second, twenty twenty one.
(14:35):
It was a Monday, an ordinary Monday by most standards,
filled with work and chores and errands. But to Daisy's mother, Susanna,
this day stuck out. It's so weird, she told me.
But that day we spent the whole day together. Susanna
relayed this to me the first time I interviewed her
(14:56):
in November twenty twenty one, nearly nine months after her murder.
She'd suggestive we meet for dinner at a Mexican restaurant
in her neighborhood. It was wedged in a suburban strip
mall in southeast LA. Reminders of Daisy were everywhere. The
CVS where she had worked was just a few doors down,
(15:16):
and the junior high and high schools she graduated from
were a short drive away. Susanna and I sat on
stools at the bar. She told me she goes by Susie.
She had big brown eyes and long brown hair parted
to one side. There was this loud mariachi music playing
in the background. So the audio from this interview isn't great,
(15:37):
and Susie did not want to be reinterviewed for this series.
Talking about it again on tape would be too painful.
We ordered tacos and we got to talking. At one point,
the bartender maybe sense that we were having this difficult conversation.
She brought over two shots at tequila on the house,
and Susie proceeded to tell me about this one day.
(15:58):
She remembered vividly. She wasn't planning to do laundry that day.
The laundromat was just across the street, but it meant
loading and unloading the car waiting around for hours, and
she just didn't want to deal with it, but Daisy
convinced her otherwise. Come on, lady, come on, Susie remembers
Daisy had said. Daisy had this way about her, this
(16:21):
way of cheering on her mother, rallying her to do
the stuff she didn't feel like doing. At the laundromat,
Daisy worked on a crossword puzzle, and at one point
she looked up and told her mom that some guy
was checking her out. Susie chimed in, how about that one.
He's checking you out, Hugh gross, Daisy had said. At nineteen,
(16:45):
she was roughly half the age of her mother. They
were both adults, and to Susie, their easy relationship felt
like a relief, especially after all the hardships of the
previous few years. Years when Susie didn't always know where
Daisy was, she might flunk out of high school, never
mind making it to college. Susie had grown frustrated. She
(17:06):
worked long hours and she didn't have time to track
Daisy's every move, and so she showed her tough love.
She let hers grew up and then deal with the consequences.
And that was when something surprising happened, She told me.
That's when Daisy started getting her life on track. She
started going to night school to make up for all
the classes she'd missed. She went to prom with friends.
(17:29):
She wore a floor length, baby blue dropless gown. She
looked like punk rock Cinderella, her white blonde hair glowing
like a halo, and by the spring of twenty nineteen,
she'd made up enough credits to walk at graduation with
the rest of her class. That fall, she enrolled at
East La College, about a half hour northeast of Compton.
(17:53):
She'd even gotten a job on campus welcoming new students,
at least until COVID hit and the school went online.
Dreamed of becoming a makeup and tattoo artist, of starting
her own business. She didn't want to work for nobody,
Susie told me, But in the meantime she was super
focused on a short term goal, one she was on
the verge of achieving. She had saved up enough money
(18:15):
to buy a used car. It seemed like everything was
going perfect, Susie told me. After they got home that
night from the laundromat, Susie said she had no energy
to make dinner, and that's when Daisy started in with
her rallying cry, come on, lady, come on. Susie went
to the kitchen. She made chicken tinga. She and Daisy
joined Daisy's grandparents in the living room. They all lived together,
(18:38):
along with Daisy's younger brother. It was a little cramped,
there was just one bathroom, but they made do. A
Spanish language news show was playing on the television. Daisy
crawled up near Susie's feet and there was this sense
of calmness. Everyone was in a good mood, especially Daisy.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
Yeah, and Adam.
Speaker 6 (19:00):
He was sick.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
That's Daisy's grandfather, Juan de La He has a round face,
bushy eyebrows, and graying hair. He says that Daisy was
about to buy a car, especially at that age. She said,
you get excited that you're going to have your own car.
It was a big deal. In La A car means freedom,
(19:22):
which was probably really important when you share an apartment
with your grandparents and your mother and your brother, especially
because the bus from Daisy's apartment to work took her
almost an hour. Took even longer for her to get
to campus, but it was worth it. Daisy was on
track to get her associate's degree in just a few months.
Maybe it was her knowledge of all the good things
(19:43):
on the horizon that put Daisy in such a good
mood that night.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
He is so they made a man.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
He Teki.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Wallan says that that night he was sitting here, as usual,
in the living room where they all used to watch TV.
It was a night that was neither cold nor hot.
He said, it was a quiet night.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
I sa temples. They were watching, you know, their programs,
And he said later he said, he realized it stood
out that that she stayed a while longer than she
usually would.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Daisy, Yeah, that's Miguel contraras he conducted this interview with me,
and he also served as a translator. Miguel and I
interviewed Juan in the living room of his Compton apartment.
It's the top unit in a two story cream colored
building off a busy boulevard. It's the place where Daisy
and her mother and her little brother used to live.
(20:50):
Miguel noticed a piece of colored tinsel taped to the
wall near the kitchen. He asked if it was for
a party, but I don't know.
Speaker 5 (20:58):
Bright every then.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
One said no, the tinsel was left over. Actually, from
two Christmases ago.
Speaker 7 (21:14):
Simple Yeah, Daisy had decorated and he hadn't bothered to
take it down.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
He called it silly, but it was clearly important to him.
It was a reminder of her. The night that he
was telling us about. It stuck out in his memory
because of how peaceful it was, how calm it was,
how everyone was getting along. But the energy in the
room seemed to change. Sometime around ten thirty p m.
(21:46):
That's when Daisy got a text message. She looked down
at her phone and she announced that she was going
to step outside.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
The Cintia.
Speaker 7 (21:57):
Was us.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
For.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Wan said that when Daisy said goodbye that night, she
was unusually affectionate. It stuck out to him the way
she gave her mother and her grandmother this big hug
before walking out the door. She assured them that she
wouldn't be long. I'll be right back, she'd said. Early
(22:33):
the next morning, jose Teyas went to take out the trash.
He's the property manager at the building where Daisy's family lived.
He's in his late fifties with piercing green eyes, dark
hair speckled with gray, and a white goatee. He was
born in mitchwa Khan, but he spent more than half
his life here in Compton, and for most of that
(22:53):
time he's lived and worked here. The property consists of
eight buildings. They are these boxy bungalows with steps that
wind down the front of them, connecting the second story
to the ground floor. There's thirty two units in all,
and Jose knows just about everyone who lives here. A
lot of his tenants use Section eight vouchers. He told
(23:14):
me they're essentially federally subsidized rent payments. It's not always
easy to find landlords who accept Section eight, so tenants
here they tend to stay awhile Jose is always busy
taking care of something or another. Like on the day
that I showed up at the property to talk to him,
he was busy trimming trees while we talked. Tenants came
(23:35):
up to ask him questions. He takes pride in his job,
he said, He's always working, and that Tuesday morning in
February of twenty twenty one was no exception. Jose walked
across the complex to the patch of concrete where all
the garbage bins were stored. He started wheeling them mount
to the alley one by one, saving the bulky items
for last. One of those items was a big blue
(23:59):
and gray pattern drug. It had been laying on the
ground a few feet away from the garbage bins in
the walkway between two apartment buildings.
Speaker 8 (24:06):
I laid the carpet the last because he's big, I
had to roll it.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Jose walked over to it and lifted it up, but
when he saw what was underneath it, he froze.
Speaker 8 (24:17):
So when I come, you picked out of the carpet,
I sold the body pull naked from the back, and
I get scared.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
It was a body lying face down on the ground.
Speaker 8 (24:27):
I'm a man, but I ask nothing, But hey, I find.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Some I'm a man, he said. I don't get scared
of nothing, but hey, I find some person there, and
I don't know what I'm gonna do. Jose had seen
and heard a lot during his more than three decades
as building manager. He'd even witnessed death in the back alley.
Speaker 8 (24:47):
Two weeks acause someone over there was a thrush at
like four years ago to kill it on the corner.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
But Jose had never seen anything quite like this, a
murder right there on the property. He started panicking, but
The first call he made wasn't to the police. It
was to his wife.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
Person, is they going to come and check?
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Call the cops? Call the cops. She responded, it seems obvious,
But to Jose it wasn't exactly intuitive because like a
lot of the people I spoke with in his building,
Jose had not had the best experiences with police. He
told me it often took them a long time to
show up, and sometimes their presence made a bad situation worse.
(25:37):
Like there's this one time.
Speaker 8 (25:39):
I called the police, the police coming and arrest me.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
It's a long story. It involves an aggressive former tenant
and Jose firing a gun into the air. He says
it was to try to scare him away from the property.
But Jose's takeaway was that the next time he had
a problem, he deal with it himself, less of a
hassle than get the police involved. But on that morning,
(26:03):
when he found the body, he knew this was not
something he could handle on his own.
Speaker 6 (26:09):
Call one on Tuesday, February twenty third, twenty twenty one,
six forty eight am. I'm on one. What's your emergency?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yes, good morning morning. That's Jose. You hear on the
nine one one call.
Speaker 6 (26:22):
You have a what dead man? A dead man in
your building?
Speaker 4 (26:29):
Yes, cycle my building.
Speaker 6 (26:30):
What's your address?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The operator asks Jose to speak up. She sounds agitated.
She says she can barely hear.
Speaker 6 (26:37):
Him speaker because I can barely hear you. No, no,
I don't.
Speaker 7 (26:40):
I don't have you speak.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
Hold on.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
But it seems pretty clear it's not the volume that's
the issue. It's the language barrier.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
Is he black white, Hispanic? Asient?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
It's covered with a lampard, he's.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Covered in a blanket, and he's sure he did deceased.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
He's a behind the blood carry the continuous, he's the
full moon. I'm going to pick it out the container.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
But I see.
Speaker 6 (27:04):
Okay, you don't know if he's black white or he's
just covered in a blanket like a white man or
a girl.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:13):
Okay, let me get fire on the line. Don't hang up, okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Nobody. As say waited for the police to arrive, his
mind raced with questions, who was this person, how do
they end up here? And who had done this to them?
(27:43):
This season on My Friend Daisy, did you hear anything
but had any noises? Way, any screaming or anything else.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
There's no cameras here.
Speaker 7 (27:52):
Most people thought, oh, this was an easy case, but
we didn't have any witnesses. I didn't find out about
her until I saw it on TikTok, and I was
just like shocked.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
I was like, nah, like it's a lie.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
You know it's a lie.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
It was shocking. It was very shocking, like that could
have been my daughter, Like you never know.
Speaker 7 (28:10):
They put out something on social media, so and they
put out my cell number. So I'd get caught in
the middle of the night all the time.
Speaker 6 (28:17):
Because she'd him everywhere.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
He's here, he's there, he's here, he's there. I would
tell other people to like, hey, you want to meet
up and look for him. I'd be so down and
I did make eye contact with him, and it freaked
me the hell out.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
This parasite represents the way she fisially murdered her like
she was lucky. It's like, how do you think you're
going to get away with something like this? Like you
killed somebody? Hello, an incarcerated individual. My Friend Day is
(29:00):
a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment.
It's reported, written and executive produced by me Jen Swan,
I'm also your host. Our executive producers for London Audio
are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker.
Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch.
(29:24):
Our associate producer is Zoe Coulkin. Production assistants and translations
by Miguel Contreras, sound design, composing and mixing by Hans
Dale she Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton, our head
of production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager is
Tamika Balance Colosny. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily Rossick
(29:48):
and Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley Greenberg
at UTA, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
Speaker 2 (30:00):
M
If you've ever scrolled through TikTok, then you know it's
full of people sharing the most intimate and sometimes the
most mundane parts of their lives. People who film everything
they ate in a day, everything they purchased on the internet,
everything they wore on vacation. People who see their lives
as content. Daisy dela Oh was not one of those people.
(00:25):
She was not an influencer, or a vlogger or a
content creator. She didn't like to share her secrets with
the world. Sometimes she even hid them from the people
closest to her. When she was murdered at the age
of nineteen, her Instagram contained just five posts, only two
of which showed her face. Slightly more than one hundred
(00:46):
people followed her. They were mostly friends from high school
and college, people she knew in real life. Nobody else
would have known to find her there. Her real name
wasn't even on the account to anyone outside of her
social circle. Her profile was essentially unsearchable. Her LinkedIn page,
created just six months before her death, listed no activity
(01:10):
and no connections, and her Facebook it seemingly hadn't been
touched in years. For the most part, Daisy lived her
life offline. And that was the way that she liked it.
But when her life was cut short in February of
twenty twenty one, a strange thing happened. Daisy went viral.
(01:34):
Photos and videos of her began to appear online, and
there was this one TikTok that really told the story
of her life and death. The first frame of it
showed Daisy on a carnival ride. It's the one where
you ripped the steering wheel and spin it around and
around in circles until you either puke or lose your
voice from screaming so much. Five words appear across the screen.
(01:58):
This is my friend Daisy. Daisy is wearing wingtip eyeliner
and a gold septum ring. She's got black and turquoise
hair peeking out from under her beanie. The neon lights
from a carnival cast this purple glow across her face.
And there's something about her expression. It's like, I don't
know the way she's looking off to the side, and
her eyes and her mouth are wide with joy that
(02:20):
is just really magnetic. A few seconds later, the TikTok
cuts to a new image, and this one has no
carnival ride, no smiles, no neon lighting, there's no joy.
It's it's mostly black, with a collage of photos of
someone else, someone suspected of murdering her. This TikTok it
(02:43):
was posted on May twenty six, twenty twenty one. It
was less than a minute long, but it accomplished two
things that nobody had been able to do up until
that point, not the media and not the police. It
got people to care about this woman they'd never met,
who came from an immigrant family and a low income neighborhood.
(03:04):
I've watched this TikTok over and over again. I've studied it,
like pausing the frames and zooming in and out and
analyzing it like it's this piece of art and I
don't know. It's not like I'm looking for some kind
of secret message within it. It's more that I'm just
in awe of its storytelling. It has this precision to it.
It hooks you in gut, punches you with a series
(03:26):
of emotions joy, horror, sadness, anger, and it conveys the
sense of urgency, this need for justice, not later, but
right now, and not from the authorities but from the community.
It gives us permission to look for answers to take control,
(03:46):
to be the sleuts we wish to see in the world.
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio by Heart Radio and
executive producer Paris Hilton. This is My Friend Daisy, Episode one,
Sitting Ducks. I would Never see.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
My daughter crowl Susanna Salas is broken. A mother grieving
her only daughter, Daisy de Lao.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
If you lived in la in the summer of twenty
twenty one, you might have come across the story on
the local ABC seven station. It was the kind of
story that TV news shows seem to love to spotlight.
It was about a promising young girl, the senseless violence
that ended her life, and the single mother left shattered.
(04:48):
There were tearful interviews set to a slow piano instrumental.
The whole thing was deeply tragic, like unspeakably sad, but
the new segment also had this unexpected element.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
La County Sheriff's detectives tracked every lead, and Friends of
Daisy launched their own campaign on.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
TikTok, the TikTok campaign. It immediately piquked my interest. This
idea that TikTok a platform nobody outside of gen Z
seemed to understand and which the federal government wants to ban,
could actually lend a voice to the people who needed
it the most. And then there were the photos of
(05:29):
Daisy herself that drew me in. I didn't know her,
but she reminded me of myself and my friends in
high school. The piercings, the rainbow hair colors, the fishnet stockings.
She dressed like I did when I was a teenager,
when I didn't quite know who I was, but I
knew I wasn't like everyone else, or at least that's
(05:50):
what I told myself. And there was something I couldn't
get out of my mind when I first saw this new.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Segment Susannah grateful to the La County Sheriff's Department detectives
who vowed to hunt down Daisy's killer.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
It was the way detectives had been celebrated in that
news clip. The narration was so over the top that
I almost wondered if it was a pr stunt for
the sheriffs. LA County homicide detectives worked endlessly on the case.
But as divine, I found it confusing because it raised
this question for me if that was true, if detectives
(06:27):
had been working endlessly on this case. Then, why did
Daisy's friends feel the need to get involved and try
to solve it themselves, to take matters into their own
hands and launch their own seemingly rogue campaign. I had
the sense that there was something missing from the story,
something that just couldn't be contained in this short news segment,
(06:48):
and I immediately wanted to know what it was. So
I got in touch with Susanna Saulis. We talked for hours,
and she told me about something one of the detectives
on the case had told her. It was something I'd
heard her talk about on that new segment. It. I
promised you me have We're going to find them. But
(07:09):
then she told me something that didn't make it onto
that TV segment, which is that the detective's words did
little to reassure her. When she heard them, she thought
to herself, bullshit, it's a Mexican American girl, who's going
to care about her? It turned out a lot of
people Daisy's friends made sure of it. I spent a
(07:30):
lot of time speaking with them in the months following
Daisy's murder. At that point, they hadn't been interviewed on
the news or by anyone at all. That I could tell.
I wanted to understand what had compelled them to become
their own detectives, to put their trauma on display for
the world. And it became clear pretty quickly that these
teenage girls hadn't made these tiktoks and Instagrams and Facebook
(07:53):
posts for clout. They definitely did not want to be
investigating their friends unsolved murder, but they well, they had
no other choice. And this thing they did it was
pretty gutsy, but it didn't exist in a vacuum. It
was part of this larger phenomenon of friends and loved
ones turning to social media when the so called justice
(08:15):
system wasn't working for them.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
I have never once met a family who said option
number one to help my family's case is to become
a content creator and try to become an influencer, not
once having met somebody where that was option A.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
That's Sarah Turney. She's a true crime TikToker, YouTuber and podcaster.
If you've ever spent time watching true crime on TikTok
or crime talk as it's sometimes called, then chances are
you've seen Sarah's videos. Talking to her over zoom felt
a little surreal. It was almost like jumping into one
of her videos to ask questions, questions like what would
(08:56):
compel someone to talk about their loved one's murder or
disappearance on social media to ask the public for help
in solving a case.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Usually, when people begin to tell their loved one stories,
it is their last resort.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
They don't know what else to do.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
You know, They've tried to go on the mainstream media
to get them to care, and their last resort is
making a podcast or a YouTube channel or a TikTok
because that's free and accessible to them.
Speaker 1 (09:25):
It's a last resort, Sarah told me, because it requires
a degree of vulnerability, which means it can also open
the door to harassment.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
We are sitting ducks for anybody to just pray on us.
We are asking the world, we are begging the world
to care about our loved ones, and that comes with
a lot of negativity.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Unfortunately, I first became aware of Sarah's videos when I
saw that someone had tagged her in the comments of
the my friend Daisy TikTok can you please help share this?
They'd written. Sarah didn't end up seeing the video. She
told me her notifications are always blowing up, so it's
easy for stuff to get married. People who make videos
(10:04):
about missing or murdered friends and loved ones, they often
tag Sarah, hoping that she'll repost them to her more
than a million TikTok followers. Sarah went viral in April
of twenty twenty. She'd made a TikTok about her sister's disappearance.
She'd tried for nearly two decades to get police to investigate,
but nothing worked until TikTok did.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
I started TikTok to ask for gen Z's help to
share my missing sister Aliss attorney's story, and they are powerfull.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Four months after she posted the TikTok, the person she'd
been accusing of murder had officially been charged. It was
her father.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
Today, I am announcing the grand jury indictment for secondary
murder of Michael Roy Turney.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
A jury later acquitted him. But Sarah's TikTok was like
this case study for others who desperately wanted to have
their day in court, to see charges filed, investigations closed,
and they knew they had a powerful resource at their disposal.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
The algorithm behind TikTok. You know it's been likened to
a slot machine in which you'll post a video and
chi ching, it goes viral. The next view may not,
and then again it goes viral. It's kind of addicting, right.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Sarah talks about TikTok as this democratizing tool, this thing
with the power to boost stories that aren't getting attention elsewhere.
Like all social media platforms, it also carries a risk
of circulating misinformation or just having it spin out of control.
But to people like Sarah, the risks are worth it.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
I think that is why families gravitate towards TikTok. It
is the most even playing field out there in terms
of all these social media platforms.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I think that's one of the reasons why I got
so many responses to the article that I ended up
writing about Daisy for New York Magazines The Cut. Maybe
it was the fact that her story first surfaced on TikTok.
It was the story that otherwise might not have been
reported on by the local TV news or by me.
(12:21):
But after the article was published, I had this feeling.
It was sort of like that feeling I had when
I was watching that new segment, like this wasn't the
end of the story, there was still this part of
it that I hadn't uncovered yet, like what actually went
wrong during the police investigation? Why had it stalled? How
did it get to this point where Daisy's friends and
(12:41):
family felt the need to take it into their own hands.
And there were bigger questions I had too, like was
social media the only way to get attention on a
murder case when it involved someone who wasn't rich, or
who wasn't already kind of famous? What was the effect
this was having on the families of crime victims putting
(13:02):
themselves in the spotlight as a last resort. Was our
justice system fundamentally broken? In other words, how much depends
upon a TikTok? When I started making this series, I
had already interviewed people who created the posts about Daisy,
but I hadn't yet talked to those who had consumed them,
who sprang into action, who I would soon discover put
(13:24):
their own safety on the line and hunted for the
suspect in their own backyards. What compelled them to get involved?
I was interested in exploring this idea of vigilante justice.
Why did so many people in Daisy's community feel abandoned
by law? Enforcement, and where did their drive come from,
this drive to demand accountability by any means necessary. I
(13:47):
ended up sitting down with both detectives in person for
the first time. I spoke to lots of people who
knew Daisy, and I spoke to a lot of people
who had only ever seen her on their phone screens.
I sipped it through legal documents, and I gained access
to records I had never seen before, records that really
shifted my understanding of this case. And I ended up
(14:10):
speaking with the person whose photos I had seen all
over the internet, the person who, according to that TikTok,
had murdered Daisy. The last time any of Daisy's family
members saw her alive was February twenty second, twenty twenty one.
(14:35):
It was a Monday, an ordinary Monday by most standards,
filled with work and chores and errands. But to Daisy's mother, Susanna,
this day stuck out. It's so weird, she told me.
But that day we spent the whole day together. Susanna
relayed this to me the first time I interviewed her
(14:56):
in November twenty twenty one, nearly nine months after her murder.
She'd suggestive we meet for dinner at a Mexican restaurant
in her neighborhood. It was wedged in a suburban strip
mall in southeast LA. Reminders of Daisy were everywhere. The
CVS where she had worked was just a few doors down,
(15:16):
and the junior high and high schools she graduated from
were a short drive away. Susanna and I sat on
stools at the bar. She told me she goes by Susie.
She had big brown eyes and long brown hair parted
to one side. There was this loud mariachi music playing
in the background. So the audio from this interview isn't great,
(15:37):
and Susie did not want to be reinterviewed for this series.
Talking about it again on tape would be too painful.
We ordered tacos and we got to talking. At one point,
the bartender maybe sense that we were having this difficult conversation.
She brought over two shots at tequila on the house,
and Susie proceeded to tell me about this one day.
(15:58):
She remembered vividly. She wasn't planning to do laundry that day.
The laundromat was just across the street, but it meant
loading and unloading the car waiting around for hours, and
she just didn't want to deal with it, but Daisy
convinced her otherwise. Come on, lady, come on, Susie remembers
Daisy had said. Daisy had this way about her, this
(16:21):
way of cheering on her mother, rallying her to do
the stuff she didn't feel like doing. At the laundromat,
Daisy worked on a crossword puzzle, and at one point
she looked up and told her mom that some guy
was checking her out. Susie chimed in, how about that one.
He's checking you out, Hugh gross, Daisy had said. At nineteen,
(16:45):
she was roughly half the age of her mother. They
were both adults, and to Susie, their easy relationship felt
like a relief, especially after all the hardships of the
previous few years. Years when Susie didn't always know where
Daisy was, she might flunk out of high school, never
mind making it to college. Susie had grown frustrated. She
(17:06):
worked long hours and she didn't have time to track
Daisy's every move, and so she showed her tough love.
She let hers grew up and then deal with the consequences.
And that was when something surprising happened, She told me.
That's when Daisy started getting her life on track. She
started going to night school to make up for all
the classes she'd missed. She went to prom with friends.
(17:29):
She wore a floor length, baby blue dropless gown. She
looked like punk rock Cinderella, her white blonde hair glowing
like a halo, and by the spring of twenty nineteen,
she'd made up enough credits to walk at graduation with
the rest of her class. That fall, she enrolled at
East La College, about a half hour northeast of Compton.
(17:53):
She'd even gotten a job on campus welcoming new students,
at least until COVID hit and the school went online.
Dreamed of becoming a makeup and tattoo artist, of starting
her own business. She didn't want to work for nobody,
Susie told me, But in the meantime she was super
focused on a short term goal, one she was on
the verge of achieving. She had saved up enough money
(18:15):
to buy a used car. It seemed like everything was
going perfect, Susie told me. After they got home that
night from the laundromat, Susie said she had no energy
to make dinner, and that's when Daisy started in with
her rallying cry, come on, lady, come on. Susie went
to the kitchen. She made chicken tinga. She and Daisy
joined Daisy's grandparents in the living room. They all lived together,
(18:38):
along with Daisy's younger brother. It was a little cramped,
there was just one bathroom, but they made do. A
Spanish language news show was playing on the television. Daisy
crawled up near Susie's feet and there was this sense
of calmness. Everyone was in a good mood, especially Daisy.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
Yeah, and Adam.
Speaker 6 (19:00):
He was sick.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
That's Daisy's grandfather, Juan de La He has a round face,
bushy eyebrows, and graying hair. He says that Daisy was
about to buy a car, especially at that age. She said,
you get excited that you're going to have your own car.
It was a big deal. In La A car means freedom,
(19:22):
which was probably really important when you share an apartment
with your grandparents and your mother and your brother, especially
because the bus from Daisy's apartment to work took her
almost an hour. Took even longer for her to get
to campus, but it was worth it. Daisy was on
track to get her associate's degree in just a few months.
Maybe it was her knowledge of all the good things
(19:43):
on the horizon that put Daisy in such a good
mood that night.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
He is so they made a man.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
He Teki.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Wallan says that that night he was sitting here, as usual,
in the living room where they all used to watch TV.
It was a night that was neither cold nor hot.
He said, it was a quiet night.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
I sa temples. They were watching, you know, their programs,
And he said later he said, he realized it stood
out that that she stayed a while longer than she
usually would.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
Daisy, Yeah, that's Miguel contraras he conducted this interview with me,
and he also served as a translator. Miguel and I
interviewed Juan in the living room of his Compton apartment.
It's the top unit in a two story cream colored
building off a busy boulevard. It's the place where Daisy
and her mother and her little brother used to live.
(20:50):
Miguel noticed a piece of colored tinsel taped to the
wall near the kitchen. He asked if it was for
a party, but I don't know.
Speaker 5 (20:58):
Bright every then.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
One said no, the tinsel was left over. Actually, from
two Christmases ago.
Speaker 7 (21:14):
Simple Yeah, Daisy had decorated and he hadn't bothered to
take it down.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
He called it silly, but it was clearly important to him.
It was a reminder of her. The night that he
was telling us about. It stuck out in his memory
because of how peaceful it was, how calm it was,
how everyone was getting along. But the energy in the
room seemed to change. Sometime around ten thirty p m.
(21:46):
That's when Daisy got a text message. She looked down
at her phone and she announced that she was going
to step outside.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
The Cintia.
Speaker 7 (21:57):
Was us.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
For.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Wan said that when Daisy said goodbye that night, she
was unusually affectionate. It stuck out to him the way
she gave her mother and her grandmother this big hug
before walking out the door. She assured them that she
wouldn't be long. I'll be right back, she'd said. Early
(22:33):
the next morning, jose Teyas went to take out the trash.
He's the property manager at the building where Daisy's family lived.
He's in his late fifties with piercing green eyes, dark
hair speckled with gray, and a white goatee. He was
born in mitchwa Khan, but he spent more than half
his life here in Compton, and for most of that
(22:53):
time he's lived and worked here. The property consists of
eight buildings. They are these boxy bungalows with steps that
wind down the front of them, connecting the second story
to the ground floor. There's thirty two units in all,
and Jose knows just about everyone who lives here. A
lot of his tenants use Section eight vouchers. He told
(23:14):
me they're essentially federally subsidized rent payments. It's not always
easy to find landlords who accept Section eight, so tenants
here they tend to stay awhile Jose is always busy
taking care of something or another. Like on the day
that I showed up at the property to talk to him,
he was busy trimming trees while we talked. Tenants came
(23:35):
up to ask him questions. He takes pride in his job,
he said, He's always working, and that Tuesday morning in
February of twenty twenty one was no exception. Jose walked
across the complex to the patch of concrete where all
the garbage bins were stored. He started wheeling them mount
to the alley one by one, saving the bulky items
for last. One of those items was a big blue
(23:59):
and gray pattern drug. It had been laying on the
ground a few feet away from the garbage bins in
the walkway between two apartment buildings.
Speaker 8 (24:06):
I laid the carpet the last because he's big, I
had to roll it.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Jose walked over to it and lifted it up, but
when he saw what was underneath it, he froze.
Speaker 8 (24:17):
So when I come, you picked out of the carpet,
I sold the body pull naked from the back, and
I get scared.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
It was a body lying face down on the ground.
Speaker 8 (24:27):
I'm a man, but I ask nothing, But hey, I find.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Some I'm a man, he said. I don't get scared
of nothing, but hey, I find some person there, and
I don't know what I'm gonna do. Jose had seen
and heard a lot during his more than three decades
as building manager. He'd even witnessed death in the back alley.
Speaker 8 (24:47):
Two weeks acause someone over there was a thrush at
like four years ago to kill it on the corner.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
But Jose had never seen anything quite like this, a
murder right there on the property. He started panicking, but
The first call he made wasn't to the police. It
was to his wife.
Speaker 8 (25:10):
Person, is they going to come and check?
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Call the cops? Call the cops. She responded, it seems obvious,
But to Jose it wasn't exactly intuitive because like a
lot of the people I spoke with in his building,
Jose had not had the best experiences with police. He
told me it often took them a long time to
show up, and sometimes their presence made a bad situation worse.
(25:37):
Like there's this one time.
Speaker 8 (25:39):
I called the police, the police coming and arrest me.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
It's a long story. It involves an aggressive former tenant
and Jose firing a gun into the air. He says
it was to try to scare him away from the property.
But Jose's takeaway was that the next time he had
a problem, he deal with it himself, less of a
hassle than get the police involved. But on that morning,
(26:03):
when he found the body, he knew this was not
something he could handle on his own.
Speaker 6 (26:09):
Call one on Tuesday, February twenty third, twenty twenty one,
six forty eight am. I'm on one. What's your emergency?
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yes, good morning morning. That's Jose. You hear on the
nine one one call.
Speaker 6 (26:22):
You have a what dead man? A dead man in
your building?
Speaker 4 (26:29):
Yes, cycle my building.
Speaker 6 (26:30):
What's your address?
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The operator asks Jose to speak up. She sounds agitated.
She says she can barely hear.
Speaker 6 (26:37):
Him speaker because I can barely hear you. No, no,
I don't.
Speaker 7 (26:40):
I don't have you speak.
Speaker 6 (26:41):
Hold on.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
But it seems pretty clear it's not the volume that's
the issue. It's the language barrier.
Speaker 6 (26:47):
Is he black white, Hispanic? Asient?
Speaker 1 (26:50):
It's covered with a lampard, he's.
Speaker 6 (26:52):
Covered in a blanket, and he's sure he did deceased.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
He's a behind the blood carry the continuous, he's the
full moon. I'm going to pick it out the container.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
But I see.
Speaker 6 (27:04):
Okay, you don't know if he's black white or he's
just covered in a blanket like a white man or
a girl.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (27:13):
Okay, let me get fire on the line. Don't hang up, okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Nobody. As say waited for the police to arrive, his
mind raced with questions, who was this person, how do
they end up here? And who had done this to them?
(27:43):
This season on My Friend Daisy, did you hear anything
but had any noises? Way, any screaming or anything else.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
There's no cameras here.
Speaker 7 (27:52):
Most people thought, oh, this was an easy case, but
we didn't have any witnesses. I didn't find out about
her until I saw it on TikTok, and I was
just like shocked.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
I was like, nah, like it's a lie.
Speaker 5 (28:04):
You know it's a lie.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
It was shocking. It was very shocking, like that could
have been my daughter, Like you never know.
Speaker 7 (28:10):
They put out something on social media, so and they
put out my cell number. So I'd get caught in
the middle of the night all the time.
Speaker 6 (28:17):
Because she'd him everywhere.
Speaker 5 (28:18):
He's here, he's there, he's here, he's there. I would
tell other people to like, hey, you want to meet
up and look for him. I'd be so down and
I did make eye contact with him, and it freaked
me the hell out.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
This parasite represents the way she fisially murdered her like
she was lucky. It's like, how do you think you're
going to get away with something like this? Like you
killed somebody? Hello, an incarcerated individual. My Friend Day is
(29:00):
a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment.
It's reported, written and executive produced by me Jen Swan,
I'm also your host. Our executive producers for London Audio
are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker.
Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch.
(29:24):
Our associate producer is Zoe Coulkin. Production assistants and translations
by Miguel Contreras, sound design, composing and mixing by Hans
Dale she Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton, our head
of production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager is
Tamika Balance Colosny. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily Rossick
(29:48):
and Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley Greenberg
at UTA, and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
Speaker 2 (30:00):
M
Host
Paris Hilton
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Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!