According to the New York Post, a 15-year-old Mexican girl named Yazmin Esmeralda has been left dead after engaging in risky behaviour for a TikTok video, asking her younger brother to record her holding a 9-millimetre Uzi submachine gun that she had discovered in a closet in their grandmother's home.
The incident happened last month in the small town of Guasave, Sinaloa when the Esmeraldas were visiting family. Yazmin was immediately killed by the shot, and the sound of the firearm reportedly woke the teenage girl's mother.
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It remains unclear exactly where on her body she was struck by the ammunition, or why the weapon was in the home, but it has been made known that just before, Yazmin asked her younger brother to film a video of her posing with the gun with the intent of uploading the footage to her TikTok account.
"That she chose to record a clip [in that way] shows that our youth is immersed in [drug cartel] culture," Sinaloa's state prosecutor, Sara Bruna Quiñonez Estrada, told Vice. "It's what they hear about at all hours."
Ultimately, she feels that the family failed to protect a vulnerable teen. "The fact that there were weapons in the house, that weren’t controlled, is the responsibility of the adults who knew there were children in the house," Quiñonez Estrada told the publication.
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Similar sentiments were echoed in conversations with the head of the state's women's ministry, María Teresa Guerra Ochoa, who said, "There are sectors [of society] that admire drug traffickers. Many of them come from poverty and so they’re seen as symbols of success."
RIP Yazmin Esmeralda.