In July 2019, Kim Devins' world shattered when police arrived at her upstate New York home on a Sunday morning. They were there to perform a welfare check on her 17-year-old daughter, Bianca. Officers explained they had received troubling reports indicating the teenager might have been harmed.
Bianca had traveled four hours to New York City for a concert with her friend, Brandon Clark. Initially, Devins struggled to comprehend the officers' grim visit. "Did they mean that they’d been in an accident?" Devins recalls. "The police bodycam footage from that time shows how confused I was."
Tragically, Bianca had not been in a car crash. She had been brutally murdered by Clark, who then took the horrifying step of broadcasting images of her mutilated body across platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. For Devins, the viral spread of these gruesome photos has become a relentless form of "psychological terrorism," sparking a years-long battle to scrub the images from the internet.
The realization of her daughter's death came in a sudden, visceral wave before she even had all the facts. While calling her father to ask him to come over, Devins says she felt a devastating, intuitive shift.
"I always pinpoint it to that exact moment, even though we didn’t understand what was happening," she explains. "All of me shook. I could almost see myself from the outside. It was as if my brain shut down to protect me and I left my body. I don’t think I’ve fully returned since."
Years later, Devins continues her agonizing fight to hold social media companies accountable, determined to reclaim her daughter's memory and spare her family from being continually traumatized by the darkest day of their lives.