Mason loved sports and the outdoors.
“We were always playing basketball, throwing the football. We were always just outside doing something,” his friend Braxton Cole-Farmer said. “Mason didn’t like just sitting at home doing nothing. If we didn’t have anything to do, we’d just go drive.”
“He was always there for everybody. If anybody just needed a friend to talk to, he wouldn’t judge you based on what’s going on in your life,” he said.
Cole-Farmer said that Mason would retreat into his phone when he was having a tough time but that it wasn’t a cause for concern.
“I mean, all of us are teenagers. We’re all addicted to our phones. So, like, seeing that, we didn’t really catch a red flag on it, because my generation of teenagers are always on their phone.”
In the months before he died, Mason had been in a turbulent relationship that family and friends said ended in a breakup. He was heartbroken, and the fallout rippled through his life at school.
At first, Mason’s parents thought it was normal teenage sorrow. But a few weeks after the breakup, Mason and his mom decided he might need professional help and began actively trying to arrange a therapy visit.
DeSerio said Mason knew the breakup had made his anxiety worse and was taking proactive steps to try to feel better.
“He was showing some anger that he didn’t usually express,” she said.
DeSerio said the family had very open lines of communication, talking about mental health, anxiety and potential treatments in the week leading up to Mason’s death. She said what she heard and saw from him didn’t seem like an emergency.
“There were also a lot of really happy times in those two weeks, too,” she said.
What she didn’t see was what Mason was consuming online — videos that included graphic and detailed depictions and methods of self-harm.
Mason liked one video in which an audio overlay said, “I wanna put a shotgun to my f—— mouth and blow my brains out,” with accompanying text about depression. The audio from that post was eventually removed, but the video remains up. Another described a plan to die by suicide, along with commentary about relationship issues.
One video he liked — it had over 67,000 likes — has text reading “what are your plans for the future?” over slow-motion video of a firearm discharging. That video is no longer available on the platform.
Even though the videos clearly allude to suicide when their elements are taken together, it appears that many of them avoided detection by TikTok’s automated moderation system. According to TikTok, the auto-moderation system is designed to pick up various types of signals that might indicate a community guidelines violation, including keywords, images, titles, descriptions and audio in a video.
TikTok declined to comment on how or why the videos Mason liked evaded its moderation system.
In addition to watching and liking the videos that mentioned suicide, Mason posted TikTok content the day he died about a rapper named Lil Loaded. Lil Loaded gained notoriety on TikTok after he reportedly died by suicide following a breakup.
After he died, Lil Loaded became a frequently cited figure among some communities on TikTok, where dozens of videos that are still on the platform glorified his death, some with over 1 million views. Most of the videos use Lil Loaded’s image or name as shorthand for dying by suicide in reaction to a breakup.
One video that was still on the platform as of early April and had over 100,000 views included an audio clip saying “oh god, why am I even living bro, why do I live?” along with text over a video reading, “bout to pull a lil loaded.”
Mason’s stepbrother, Anthony, 16, said Mason changed his TikTok profile photo the day he died to a photo of Lil Loaded and joked with him before school that he was going to “pull a Lil Loaded.”
Anthony said he asked Mason whether he was suicidal, but Mason said he was just joking around.
That evening, Nov. 14, 2022, DeSerio tried to take Mason’s phone away from him so he could get a good night’s sleep, something she said she regularly did for his mental health. But Mason has just gotten his phone back after having been grounded for fighting at school, DeSerio said. When she tried to take it away from him again, he ran across the room and punched her.
DeSerio said she was shocked. He had never been violent toward her, and it wasn’t like the Mason she knew.
Mason’s mother and stepfather, Dave, took his phone away.
While Jennie and Dave regrouped, Mason, crying and emotional, went to his room and locked the door without their realizing.
When Dave realized that Mason had gone to his room, he ran there and pounded on the door, trying to get him to unlock it.
But Mason was already gone. The 16-year-old died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
