Social media is a place where people communicate and interact. It's the digital world where users can socialize, without having to care about language, distance or time.
Because people can share pretty much anything, then anything can be shared.
Including a scene of a crime, and a murdered victim.
In Pennsylvania, U.S., a female transgender teenager has been found guilty for killing her 12-year-old friend while they were watching Netflix together, and then posting photos of the child’s body on Instagram.
18-year-old Ash Cooper, originally charged as Joshua Cooper, pleaded guilty to charges including third-degree murder, possession of an instrument of crime and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence in the death of Morgan Connors.
It all began back in November 25, 2022, when the two friends were watching a film on Netflix, at a trailer park in Bensalem Township.
In between, Morgan had to go the bathroom, and left Cooper on his own.
This was when the transgender stood up, and decided to approach her father’s gun safe, according to court documents obtained by the Bucks County Courier Times.
What happened next is that, the police would later received a call from the mother of one of Cooper’s acquaintances, who said she saw Morgan’s body in a video call on Instagram.
"From the call, investigators learned that a juvenile witness was on an Instagram video chat with an acquaintance, later identified as Cooper, who claimed to have just killed someone," the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
"In that video chat, Cooper flipped the video image and showed the legs and feet of someone covered in blood."
Cooper then asked the acquaintance to help her clean up and dispose of the body.
It was at this time, that the teen told her mother.
The authorities were dispatched, and as soon as they arrived at the scene, they found Cooper "running out of the back of the trailer."
In the bathroom, they found Morgan, dead from a gunshot wound, and with pants down to around her ankles.
At the scene, the officers found towels they suspect were used to clean the blood.
There are also cleaning supplies, and a strong odor of bleach.
This suggests that Cooper was trying to clean the crime scene, and had to leave everything he was doing because the police arrived.
The police confirmed this, saying that there was substantial evidence that someone tried to clean up the crime scene.
Neighbors said that they heard a gunshot but didn't think anything of it at the time.
"I was going to invite the kid over for turkey dinner because his dad was hunting that day," said a neighbor.
According to Bensalem police, Cooper told investigators that he was cleaning out his dad's safe and sorting through the guns and ammunition before the 13-year-old girl was dropped off at his home.
Cooper claims the girl went to the bathroom and that's where detectives say she was killed.
The investigation revealed that Cooper used a gun from her father’s gun safe in the home to shoot the victim, by simply replacing the batteries her father removed to make the combination lock inoperable.
"It was an accident," Cooper said, according to an affidavit.
At first, Cooper didn't reveal the motive behind the killing, prosecutors said, but an affidavit stated that she told the police she had been in a sexual relationship with the victim.
Cooper’s attorney said in court that she had a “difficult upbringing," and this case made her feel “significant remorse and sorrow.”
But Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Finley expressed his concerns about Cooper’s "troubling history of conduct and treatment of other people" and the lack of any "real explanation for what happened."
Because of this, he sentenced Cooper to 15 to 40 years in prison, followed by seven years of probation, and recommended that she be placed in a therapeutic community within the state prison system.
And also because Cooper is 18, she is considered an adult, meaning that she needs to "follow all the rules and recommendations of adult probation and parole and undergo psychological and psychiatric evaluations."