14-year-old girl sets house on fire after reading Slender Man and because her mother told her to clean her room. A 14-year-old girl from Florida sets her home on fire with her mother and brother inside and blames her crime on internet fictional characters. The 14-year-old girl named Lily Marie Hartwell tells authorities that she has suicidal thoughts and the desire to kill her relatives. The teen is charged with two counts of attempted murder. Meanwhile, some are blasting the mom for not keeping an eye on what her daughter was doing on the internet.
14-year-old girl sets house on fire over the fact she was asked by her mom to clean her room and because she spends too much reading Slender Man and Soul Eater.
The incident took place in Port Richey, a city in Pasco County, Florida. Last week Thursday, a teenager named Lily Marie Hartwell got into a small argument with her mother after she was told to tidy up her room.
The events that followed the mother/daughter squabble are disturbing and raises the question, at what age should parents stop monitoring their kids’ activities on the internet?
According to officers from the New Port Richey Police Department, the mom, her 9-year-old son and her 14-year-old daughter went to bed at around 10:15 PM.
Two hours later, the mother (who did not wish to reveal her name to the media) was awoken by the beeping sound of several smoke alarms in the home.
The woman rushed to the bedroom where her two children were sleeping and found only her son. She rapidly fled the burning home and called the police.
As she waited for the firefighters and cops to arrive, the mom went back into the home to search for her missing child, but in vain.
Members of the New Port Richey Police Department looked for the 14-year-old girl for over an hour and a half, and never found her.
The mom eventually received two text messages from the girl where she confessed to setting the house on fire and apologized for what she did.
In one message, she told her mother sorry because she did not know what she did was so bad. In the second one, she asked her mom was anyone hurt in the fire?
Thanks to Hartwell’s smarthphone, police easily located her in a nearby park. When police interrogated the girl, she explained that the argument with her mom triggered some weird emotions.
She tried to sleep, but wild thoughts were running in her head, so she decided to act on them.
She woke up, removed her nightgown because she did not want it to burn and walked into the kitchen where she found a bottle of liquor.
She mixed the alchool with other liquids and headed into the garage, poured the mixture on a curtain and set it on fire.
The 14-year-old also said that a passage in an e-book called Soul Eater (see picture on the right) that she read before going to bed lead her to setting the home on fire, while her mother and younger brother slept inside.
The popular Japanese manga is set in the fictive “Death Weapon Meister Academy,” where the characters must collect the souls of 99 evil humans and one witch, and start the process over and again.
Police also discovered the 14-year-old’s dairy where she scribbled the word killing and wrote about having suicidal thoughts, and dreamed of killing her entire family.
A look into her computer history, revealed the young girl spent hours reading the controversial internet character Slender Man on Creepypasta.com.
And that she was fascinated by Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, the two 12-year-old girls who stabbed a classmate 19 times and left her in the woods to die.
The pair who is facing up to 60 years in prison claimed they tried to murder the girl in order to please Slender Man.
Hartwell was charged with two counts of attempted murder and might be trialed as an adult.
14-year-old girl sets house on fire and the story sparks an intense debate on why the mom failed to monitor the kid’s activity on the internet?
Why didn’t the mother install a simple internet filter or parental control software to keep the child away from sites that focus on death and suicide?
The case is also a reminder of the effects caused by some fictional characters on the psyche of those who are mentally fragile.
