Police have been trying to track down a Texas teen after she claimed she has COVID-19 and is “willingly spreading” it.
The girl, 18-year-old Lorraine Maradiaga will be charged with terroristic threat, Huffington Post reports. The Carrollton Police Department named the suspect on Sunday after she shared a number of concerning and strange Snapchat videos during the weekend.
In one of the videos, Maradiaga says she’s at Walmart and says she’s “about to infest every (expletive), because if I’m going down, all you (expletive) are going down,” according to Dallas-Fort Worth news station KXAS.
In a second video, it looks like the teen is in a car, waiting to be tested for coronavirus at a drive-through site. In the background, a nurse tells the person driving to go home and wait for the results. In another video, Maradiaga continuously coughs into the camera and says, “If you want to get the coronavirus and (expletive) die, call me.”
The police tweeted that they don’t know if she has COVID-19 and “have no confirmation Maradiaga is actually a threat to public health.” However, they are still taking the girl’s actions “very seriously.”
A Carrollton PD representative told HuffPost that Maradiaga wasn’t home when officers visited her on Sunday, and they’re still looking for her, as of Monday. The rep added that the department is now working “in conjunction with the Dallas Field Office of the FBI.”
A Twitter user shared another Snapchat video of Maradiaga, seemingly from the teen’s Snapchat account. “Like 60 people screen-recorded my whole Snapchat, I don’t give a fuck,” she says into the camera. “Make me famous, bitch.”
There have been other cases where people are using the pandemic to threaten the public’s health. In March, a Missouri man filmed himself in a Walmart licking various items and asking “who’s afraid” of coronavirus. He was later charged with making a terrorist threat, which is a low-level felony.
