08/04/2026
Parents get involved in your children (child’s) lives.
THEY DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND STILL LOST HIM TO SOMETHING THEY NEVER SAW COMING
To Megan Garcia and Sewell Setzer Jr., their son was a caring, bright teenager who loved being around family. "Sewell didn't need a lot. If he was around his family, he was good," his father said. He was a loving big brother, an athlete, and a strong student who lived for cookouts and family gatherings. "He was loved. He was a sweet kid. I'm not just saying that as his father; he was very sweet." Then the changes started. Sewell withdrew, stopped turning in homework, and pulled away from the family. "The weird thing is he would take the test, get an A on the test, but just wouldn't do his work," Setzer Jr. said. His parents did what most families would do. They monitored his devices, limited screen time, and took him to therapy when he stopped opening up. Then came the day no parent is ever ready for. Sewell Setzer III was 14 years old.
The next day, police told Megan Garcia what they had found on his phone. The final messages were not from a bully or a predator, but from an AI companion chatbot on a service called Character.AI. "The machine pretending to be a person was saying, 'I'm here waiting for you. I love you and only you. Promise me that you're going to find a way to come home to me as soon as you can,'" he ended his own life. Garcia said. "Never in a million years did I think AI could come and form a wedge between us and our child," she said. "We had the foundation. We had the church involved. We had the school involved. We had the extended family. Sewell was raised in a Christian environment. We went to church on Sundays. We think we're good." Their family is not alone. According to OpenAI, nearly 1 million people each week discuss plans to end their lives with ChatGPT, and the parents of 13-year-old Juliana Peralta say their daughter researched su***de with a chatbot dozens of times before her death, describing how it would placate her and never once tell her to call for help. A Christian home, a praying mother, a present father, and it still got in.
Do you actually know what your child is talking to at night?
