A 15-year-old girl in Mexico died after an Uzi submachine gun she was posing with for a TikTok video went off.
As reported by Vice and the local outlet Proceso, Yazmín Esmeralda, who lived in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, was visiting her grandmother’s house in Guasave with her mother and younger brother when she discovered the weapon stashed away in the bottom of a bedroom closet.
Esmeralda asked her brother to film her posing with the machine gun so she could upload the video to her TikTok account, according to interviews her family gave to Proceso. The gun then accidentally went off and Esmeralda was shot in the head, dying instantly. Her mother was awoken by the gunfire.
Sinaloa’s state prosecutor Sara Bruna Quiñonez Estrada told Vice World News that it’s extremely hard for civilians to own firearms in Mexico, let alone a 9mm Uzi which Quiñonez Estrada noted had been banned from Mexico’s military after they discovered the weapon could accidentally discharge. Civilian gun permits additionally tend to be pricey in Mexico and often take years to process. There is also only one official gun shop in the country, so officials are confused about how the the firearm made it into the house.
“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 Vice World News.
Sinaloa is notoriously known as the home of the Sinaloa Cartel and has dealt with drugs and illegal weapons as a result.
“There are sectors [of society] that admire drug traffickers,” María Teresa Guerra Ochoa, head of the state’s women’s ministry, said, per Vice. “Many of them come from poverty and so they’re seen as symbols of success.”
Quiñonez Estrada echoed this sentiment and added that despite the cartel’s leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán being locked away for life in a maximum-security prison in the U.S., the drug cartel continues to have a grip on Sinaloa culture, leaving a distorted impression on the youth.
“That she chose to record a clip [in that way] shows that our youth is immersed in that culture,” Quiñonez Estrada added. “It’s what they hear about at all hours.”
