Roblox, Discord sued over 15-year-old boys suicide after alleged sexual abuse online

The mother of a 15-year-old boy who killed himself is suing Roblox and Discord for wrongful death, alleging the apps’ lack of guardrails allowed her son to be sexually coerced by an adult predator into sending explicit photos.Ethan Dallas – an autistic teen known as the class clown and the star pitcher on a baseball team for kids with disabilities – made a new friend on Roblox after a player who said he was a child named Nate started messaging him, according to a suit filed last week in the Superior Court of San Francisco County.The pair would play Roblox – a world-building video game – together every day and talk late into the night.Nate eventually showed Ethan how to disable some of the parental controls his parents had set up.That’s when the conversations turned sexual and moved to the messaging app Discord, where Nate demanded Ethan send explicit photos of himself – threatening to share their messages otherwise, according to the lawsuit.Ethan started having anger fits, which grew so intense that in December 2022, his mother, Becca Dallas, and her husband placed Ethan in a residential treatment center for a year, according to the New York Times.“I’m sorry.

I feel so bad about myself.I feel like I’m worthless,” Ethan wrote Becca in a text message in December 2023, according to the report.“Promise you won’t get mad if I tell you?” the 15-year-old wrote.Becca took Ethan to a Denny’s near their home in San Diego, where he told her about his messages with Nate on Roblox – his favorite video game that he had been playing since he was about seven years old.“I couldn’t believe it,” Becca told the New York Times.

She said that she thought Roblox “was a children’s game.”After returning to school, Ethan seemed normal – catching up with schoolwork and talking about buying his dad’s car and painting it purple once he got his driver’s license. One night, Ethan woke Becca up with a knock on her bedroom door.“He just came a...