It’s almost too horrible for the human brain to comprehend. One family with five children all suffering from various forms of cancer? How can anything be that tragically awful?
Yesterday morning, Juliet Swift let the world know about her family tragedy. On her public Facebook prayer page (now deleted but which can be found here), Juliet wrote that her beautiful four year old daughter Angel had died of DIPG. Juliet posted that although it was hard on the kids, she herself felt peace that Angel was out of pain.
Of course, kindhearted people rushed in to support Juliet and her family after their horrible loss. When these new readers found out about the plight of Juliet’s other family members, it became too much to bear.
Later in the day, Juliet’s husband Mike posted.
Mike, as you can read above, feels dumb because it took the death of his child to “start a whole thing about childhood cancer.” Apparently seeing all five of his children and his wife get diagnosed with various forms of the disease wasn’t enough.
Luckily, Juliet has a close friend, Rita Joy, who stepped in to show her support.
Yes, poor Rita also lost two children to cancer. She also adopted another child (thirteen short days after meeting her at a hospital), a young girl named Arianna who is dying of cancer. Arianna also has a Facebook prayer page. Horribly tragic. Horribly fake.
We found all the pictures of the children on other blogs, and the vast majority of them were taken from the blogs of families whose children had died. Died in reality, not on a fake Facebook page.
Last evening, after watching Juliet Swift’s fake drama play out on Facebook all afternoon, we decided to post on our public Facebook page that the Prayers for the Swifts page was fake. I didn’t have time to write a blog post, but watching actual parents who have lost children mourn for a fake child on a Facebook page was too much. A few hours after my post, the fake page had a new post.
Now, first of all, I need to say we take suicide threats very seriously. I called the police station in the town where I believe this hoaxer lives and I explained the situation. It didn’t seem like there was much they could do, but I did let them know. Many of our readers reported the post to Facebook. I messaged the page and gave the hoaxer my phone number and asked her to call me. She ended up making several comments saying she had called an ambulance and was getting help and then she deleted the page.
That being said, I don’t believe our hoaxer is a 24 year old who lost a baby to cancer years ago. I’m very convinced it’s a much younger person, a teenager. In fact, our plan was to post that the Facebook page was fake and not reveal the hoaxer if we found out his or her name.
Why do I think it’s a teenager? Well, ever since Taylor Swift’s beautiful song Ronan came out, we’ve had an explosion of fake blogs created by teenagers writing about losing their children to cancer. They all reference Taylor Swift at some point. A few of them have been laughingly bad and such obvious fakes that after one email from me, the hoaxers deleted the blog.
Rita Joy, who we believe is another creation by the same person who made the Prayers for the Swifts page, has many friends who all attend the same high school. It’s too many friends to just be a coincidence. We suspect the hoaxer also attends this school.
That being said, because we suspect the hoaxer is very young, we’re not going to reveal his or her name even if we figure it out. We ARE going to continue to try and figure out who the person is to make sure he or she is getting help. If the writer of these Facebook pages is reading this (and we know you are), I would love to talk with you. Please get in touch at warriorelihoax@gmail.com.
As usual, we ask our readers to show compassion to this person in the comment section. Trust me, I know that it can be hard at times when you see how badly these hoaxes hurt people, but we appreciate it.
