TikTok star Ava Majury has opened up about the terrible night a stalker attempted to break into her home in the middle of the pandemic, revealing that the harrowing home invasion ended with her father shooting a man dead.
Ava, now 15, is a popular presence on TikTok with well over 1 million followers on her main account and nearly 58 million likes over her many uploads. She got into TikTok when she was just 13. Her videos, which usually consist of dancing of lip-syncing, quickly gained traction and she grew in popularity.
In a new interview New York Times, Ava and her family discussed the dark side of internet fame, and the way in which one man's obsession quickly turned violent.
In 2020, when Ava was 13, she was contacted on various social media platforms by a man named EricJustin111. She explained she responded to him a few times at first, as she would always try and engage with her fans.
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Not long after this, Ava realised that friends from New Jersey and Florida had been selling this man pictures of her, and had even given out her phone number. Ava's parents apparently decided it would be okay for her to sell Justin pictures of her face, provided they'd already been posted to Snapchat.
“I wasn’t sending anything of my body,’’ Ava said. “It was just pictures of my face, which is what I assume that he was paying for. My whole thing is my pretty smile — that’s my content.”
Justin soon added Ava on Venmo, where he asked for feet and "booty" pics. She swiftly blocked him on all platforms. Ava's father then text him demanding he leave her alone. Justin responded by sending messages to Ava's classmates, in which he detailed plans to assault her.
On July 10, 2020, 18-year-old Eric Rohan Justin showed up at Ava's house with a shotgun and blew the front door open. He was chased off by Ava's father, who immediately grabbed his handgun and waited by the broken door for the police to arrive. According to reports, Mr. Majury ordered the teenager to drop the shotgun. When he instead pointed it at him, Mr. Majury fired, killing him.
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As a result of Florida's “stand your ground” law, Ava's father was not prosecuted. Police uncovered two phones on Justin's body, containing thousands of photos of Ava.
Ava remains on TikTok and other platforms, in spite of the traumatic experience. Her mother, Kim Majury, said that she didn't want “sick individuals” to scare her daughter away from social media.
“Why should we allow them to stop her? Maybe she’s meant to bring awareness to all this,” Mrs. Majury said.
Topics: TikTok