When a 14-year-old girl used Facebook Live to live-stream her suicide, the world came to discover the help she desperately needed and never received from Florida’s social services agencies, notes her attorney. Her destructive behavior and long stint in foster care should have been sufficient warning. But as with other cases, warning flags were missed, overlooked, or ignored.
While social media was the channel Nakia chose to tell the world of her plight, questions must be aimed at state officials. “Nakia told the world, in the way she left this world, about the terrible failures in (Florida’s) foster care system,” notes coverage from the Associated Press. “We first need to look more than anywhere else at what is going on in our backyards in Florida.”