When Daisy De La O was killed, friends looked to social media for the man they suspected did it. They found him. jenn_swann reports
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Fuentes, now 20, says she and Daisy De La O had been inseparable ever since they met as high-school freshmen in Huntington Park, just outside Los Angeles, where they grew up. By the time she posted the emotional montage, it had been more than three months since 19-year-old De La O had been found stabbed to death and wrapped in a roll of carpet outside her Compton apartment complex.
The idea of a TikTok leading to a break in a murder case was not unheard of. About a year before Fuentes posted her video, Sarah Turney began posting TikToks about her older sister, Alissa, who had disappeared from their home in Phoenix, Arizona, nearly 20 years earlier.
Yet the proliferation of cold cases on social media makes perfect sense to Tamborra, who sees it as a natural evolution in Americans’ fascination with crime — particularly when it hits close to home. “We have so many stories of families putting pressure on departments; why wouldn’t they then turn to social media?” Tamborra says. “Now the problem obviously is: Why should they have to?”
“That’s when it seemed like everything was going perfect,” says Salas, who is 40 years old and wears her long dark hair in a low ponytail. She says De La O was saving up to buy a used car and had been taking business-administration courses at East Los Angeles College. She had hoped to become a tattoo-and-makeup artist and open her own beauty shop someday.
“She was embarrassed,” Salas says of the incident. “She was such a mature, rough girl that, for her, that was embarrassing that she was getting hit by this person, you know? Especially ’cause she never saw actual physical violence between me and her dad.” That was when, while in the car together, De La O told her mom that she had broken up with “what’s his face.” As Salas recalls, her daughter knew Salas didn’t even like to say his name. Salas was elated but played it cool in front of her daughter. “Inside of me, I was jumping up and down, but I couldn’t show it because teenagers are just so weird, you know?” she says. “I honestly think that she had broken up with him so many times before, but this time I think she really didn’t love him anymore.
She asked a friend to drive her home from work — “I was a wreck, you know?” she says — and rushed over to her apartment complex, which had been cordoned off with yellow tape. “‘Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby? Where’s my baby?’ That’s all I kept saying, ‘Where’s my baby?’” Salas says, reenacting her guttural screams at a whisper volume inside the restaurant. “Nothing. Zero. And I was like, ‘Where’s my daughter? Where’s my kid?’ When I turned around, I saw a body bag.
The only thing De La O had kept secret from even her closest friends was Sosa’s physical abuse. “She knows that we all would’ve pushed her to walk away,” says Fuentes, who adds that De La O made it clear she didn’t like to talk about her relationship. “I personally think she knew that if she tried to walk away, he would physically hurt her. She just never thought it would get to this point.”
By early May, more than two months after De La O’s murder, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department still had not publicly identified Sosa as a suspect, nor had it asked for the public’s help in locating him. Detective Lugo, who was in charge of the case, maintains there was good reason. “There was doubt. There was always doubt. We can’t be wrong,” he tells me, arguing that the department did not have witnesses — at least at first — and that residents of Compton tend to be uncooperative with police.
Still, even without video evidence, domestic-violence experts say they can’t imagine a scenario in which Sosa would not have been considered the most obvious suspect. “The most dangerous time for a woman in a domestic-violence relationship, where lethality increases, is at point of breakup,” says Tamborra, who previously trained police departments on how to respond to domestic violence and sexual assault.
Salas pulled over and demanded Garcia tell her what was going on. She knew Garcia had created an Instagram page called “Justice for Daisy” — launched around the same time as the TikToks went live — and for weeks Garcia had been fielding comments and messages from strangers who said they thought they had seen Sosa. Garcia vetted the tips and sent the promising ones to Salas, who then relayed them to Detective Lugo, she says. The tip that came in that morning was different.
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