April 2, 2025 • 29 mins
Daisy’s friends remember her as a tough but caring, big-hearted teenager who overcame significant obstacles from a young age. She always put on a smile no matter what, was quick to lend a hand to those in need, and often prioritized her friends and loved ones’ problems before her own. But her life began to change in high school, and before anyone realized the extent of it, she’d found herself in horrible danger.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
This episode contains descriptions of intimate partner violence. Please listen
with care.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My name is Lali rolon By. They coming Lally, so
a lot of people like it. Ever hit me as
Sally and they were like, oh, yeah, Lally. She went
to school with her.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
The person that Lollie went to school with was Daisy.
They met in the seventh grade when they get home
room together and.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
For some reason we ended up sitting in the same
table and we ended up talking, you know, and to me,
she was really beautiful. She had beautiful eyes. Her eyes
or what caught my attention. I was like wow, and
we started getting close. She was so like nice, caring.
She would always ask me like, you know, like those
type of going friends, how are you doing, how are
(00:43):
you feeling? And like when I would talk to her,
it was all like smiles, you know, like laughs and
smiles and everything.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
And then we ended up getting closer in eighth grade
because I.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Had her for keea junior High was more than a
decade ago for Lollie. She's in her early twenties now.
She's got wavy brown hair parted down the middle, and
on the day that we met, she wore a Whitney
Houston t shirt. She wants to be a nurse someday,
delivering babies, but for the time being, she delivers something else,
food from local restaurants that's in between classes at East
(01:15):
La College. I first reached out to Lali on TikTok.
Her profile is filled with funny, candid videos, nothing too edited,
nothing too trendy, just snippets of everyday life. A friend
walking around with a paper bag over her head, soccer
teammates banging on plastic bottles to make an ASMR drum beat.
Lalie and I met up at a coffee shop in
(01:36):
Huntington Park. It's a working class suburb just a few
miles south of downtown Los Angeles. We sat at an
outdoor table on Pacific Boulevard, the main shopping district. It's
filled with signs and Spanish advertising, tax lawyers and passport photos.
There are huge, glittery boutiques that sell tuxedos and princess
like Kinsaniera addresses. The business is here cater to a
(01:59):
population of mostly immigrants, like Lolly's family they're from Tebasco, Mexico,
and Daisy's family back when they lived here, they're from
Mexico City. Daisy and Lolly bonded instantly. They had the
kind of closeness where they could spend hours together, sometimes
without even saying a word. But there were times when
Lollie wondered if there was more going on with Daisy
(02:20):
than she let on.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I feel like she never really told me what was
going on, deep deep inside. Maybe she didn't want people
to know him. Maybe she wanted to make it seem
like she was always fine, you know, because that's what.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
She seemed like. It seemed like she was always okay.
It seemed like she was always happy.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
This idea that Daisy always put on a smile no
matter what it was something that came up a lot
when I spoke to her friends.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
She could have been going through problems and she'd put
yours before hers. You know, she wouldn't even tell you
about hers to help you with yours. So I feel
like that shows a lot. There's not a lot of
people that would do that. You know, a lot of
people just focus on them, like all my problems, my problems,
and when you talking about yours, like, oh no, not
right now, like I'm talking about mine.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And Lolly and Daisy drifted apart in high school, Lollie
went to one school, Daisy to another. But Daisy always
stayed on Lolly's mind.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
But that love that I had for her from elementary,
middle school, whatever, is always there.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
You know, It's always gonna stay there.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Even just because of when I suparate, way doesn't mean
that I'm ever gonna forget about her.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Because even even.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Daisy and Lolly went ended up having a chance encounter
in high school. In this encounter, it shed light on
Daisy's inner life, on one of the difficult things that
she was struggling with in the years after they lost touch.
It still haunts Lolly today.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
When I found out what happened, That's when I was
like down like, I felt guilty.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I felt remorse. When I was like down like, I
wondered if I could have helped her.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio. iHeart Radio an executive
producer Para Selton. This is My Friend Daisy, Episode three,
Smile Now I'll cry Later. Valerie Ariano was two grades
above Daisy. She was a sophomore in high school when
(04:12):
Daisy was in the eighth grade.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
She was still a little kid, still with her little
She hadn't had her hair died yet, and I would
see her like in the school uniform. She was so
sweet and innocent.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's possible that the two might never have met if
Valerie's best friend didn't end up getting pregnant. The father
was Daisy's older brother.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I was worried for my friend, you know, having a
kid so young, because you were like fifteen or sixteen,
and Daisy was I think barely thirteen. So I did
worry about my friend going through something like that so young.
But I think I felt a little bit calmer seeing
that she had Daisy there. She was living with her
(04:53):
at the time, and I felt like Daisy kind of
in a way became like another sister for her, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
When the baby was born in the fall of twenty fifteen,
Daisy embraced being an aunt. Later she would even get
a tattoo of the baby's name. Daisy adored the baby's
mother too. She got a septum ring just like her,
and started dying.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
Her hair like her too.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
I'm pretty sure she was already interested in that stuff,
but I think living with my friend, and because my
friend would dye her hair all the time too, she'll
have it like so burnt from like dying you red,
having a blonde, dying of blue, green, purple.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I'm laughing because I can relate. My hair was also
fried in high school. Honestly, my brain was probably a
little fried too, from all the bleach I put on
my head, followed by clumps of manic panic and neon shades.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
And I started seeing Daisy dress up like tat too,
and she looks so cool. And I remember she would
dye her hair like all these different kinds of colors,
and at one point she had a blonde, and she
kind of reminded me of like Courtney Love. I don't
know if some people take that as a fence or compliment.
She looked really cute, though.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Valeries, in her mid twenties, was short, curly bangs and
thick care that when we met she wore in two braids.
I had messaged Valerie on Facebook after noticing that she
donated to the GoFundMe that Daisy's mother had started to
help with her funeral costs. Valerie's Facebook page is like
a community bulletin board. She often reposts flyers about missing
(06:25):
people and lost pets, PSAs about shelter animals that need homes,
and in person she was just as sensitive and caring
as her online profile suggested. A few years back, she
told me she started studying sociology at cal State LA
because she wanted to work in homeless services. Then she
got disillusion and switched over to art education. She wants
(06:47):
to get her teaching credential someday to work in a
field where she can really.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
Have an impact and make a difference.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
We sat at a picnic table outside the Civic Center
in Huntington Park. That's where Valerie grew up and where
she still lives, and she told me about the first
time she met Daisy, about how she watched as Daisy's
style and musical tastes began to evolve.
Speaker 5 (07:10):
Go'll see her.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Wear like Nirvana's shirts. I would be wearing those shirts
of the Smiths, and she would ask me like, oh,
where did you buy that shirt?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Not I would tell her like, oh.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I'm Pacific nearby walking distance, And I started seeing her
wear shirts of the Smiths too.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
With her tough exterior, Daisy sometimes gave off the ear
of someone who was unfazed self a shirt, but underneath
it all, she was going through a lot. It seems
like she was probably dealing with a lot of uncertainty.
Her parents were getting a divorce after nearly two decades
of marriage. It was finalized in the summer of twenty seventeen,
and based on what I've heard from Daisy's mother, Susie,
(07:52):
it must have been hard on Daisy. I haven't been
able to reach her father. I asked his father, Juan
de lo Oh, to help us get in touch her back.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
But from what.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Susie told me, Daisy used to be very close with
her father. A daddy's girl is how she put it.
She was really like this with her dad, she told me,
crossing her index and middle fingers together. But after the split,
Susie and Daisy got a lot closer. They ended up
moving in with Daisy's grandparents in Compton. It was a
tight squeeze, but it was at least familiar. They'd all
(08:24):
lived there for a time when Daisy and her siblings
were younger. Susie told me that in order to maintain
a sense of normalcy, she decided not to take her
kids out of the schools they were already enrolled in.
Now Daisy had to commute to school from a different city,
Huntingdon Park, was a straight shot on the bus eight
miles north along Beach Boulevard until it turned into Pacific.
(08:45):
The drive took a half hour by car, or sometimes
an hour on public transit. It's hard to imagine this
was an easy transition. Daisy was living far from her friends,
her school, her community, and now she had to navigate
a new living arrangement with extend family members she didn't
always get along with. But around this time, when Daisy
was a sophomore in high school, she began dating somebody
(09:08):
that seemed to bring her comfort, at least in the beginning.
When she introduced her mother to her boyfriend, she said
that he was seventeen, just two years older than she was,
and at first Susie had no reason to doubt that.
Victor Sosa looked like your average teenage skateboarder. Could carried
(09:28):
a skateboard with him wherever he went. He had thick
eyebrows and a thin mustache. He sometimes grew his dark
lady hair past his shoulders. But the thing that everybody
noticed about him was his ear lobes. They'd been stretched
engaged with jewelry. It looked like big black discs. His
(09:49):
appearance didn't bother, Susie, she was actually suspicious of him
for another reason. He was too quiet, she told me,
And pretty soon she began to notice things about him
that made her suspect he was a lot older than seventeen.
I saw tattoos on him, she told me, a lot
of tattoos, and I'm like, how old is he?
Speaker 5 (10:10):
For real?
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Susie would later discover that her daughter had lied to
her about her boyfriend's age. He was already twenty one
when Daisy was fifteen. Susie had always felt like she
and her daughter run a team, but after Victor came
into the picture, she no longer felt that way. It
seemed like everything had changed. Susie had been working long
(10:31):
hours to make ends meet. She was seeing less and
less of her daughter, and when they did hang out,
Daisy never wanted to talk about Victor. Susie told me.
A number of Daisy's friends told me the same thing,
that Victor was a topic that was always off limits.
They didn't know much about him, and they weren't even
really sure how the two of them met, but they
(10:52):
knew better than.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
To ask about it. When they did, Daisy.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Sometimes told them that he wasn't worth talking about but
Victor clearly didn't feel that way about Daisy. It was
like he wanted the whole world to know about his relationship,
because on Instagram he filled his grid with photos of
her Daisy with her hair bleached blonde and then dyed
jack lantern orange daisy and fishnets climbing a fence, Daisy
(11:18):
and fishnets on a beach, Daisy in an antique shop,
a little yellow daisy propped in the buttonhole of her
jeene jacket. His Instagram contained a few photos of himself too.
There was one photo that showed off his tattoos on
his leg, an image of Jason the Killer from Friday
the thirteenth, two blades arranged like crossbones under a hockey
(11:39):
mask across as abdomen, an outline of the Grim Reaper.
It seemed like he had a thing for horror movies,
right down to the clothes he wore. He even sometimes
dressed like Freddy Krueger in a red striped sweater and
bowler hat. His look sometimes freaked people out, like Jose Tayas,
the apartment manag at Daisy's building. He'd sometimes see Victor
(12:02):
hanging around the apartment complex with Daisy and he was
not into it. I see his black grass and looked
like a shadow.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Looked like a different along the people.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
He dressed in all black, like a shadow, Jose said.
Then he compared Victor to the Undertaker, the wrestler who
entered the ring in a black leather trench coat and
top hat. Daisy's style had become a little theatrical too.
Her hair was cut short and asymmetrical, and her makeup
was dark and bold. She looked a little like the
(12:39):
nineteen eighties punk singer Susi Sue. By her junior year
of high school, she had changed her looks so much
that Lolly, her friend from middle school, had to do
a double take when she spotted Daisy on the bus.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
I only recognized her because of her eyes. Her appearance
was completely different, her hair was dye, her makeup was
like at that moment, to me, it was like a
little like I thought about it crazy and in a sense,
you know, but now that I think about like, it's
not crazy.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
It was just her expressive how she felt, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
She and Daisy hadn't seen each other in yours and
Lollly wasn't even sure if it was really Daisy.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
She was seeing on a.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Type of person that if you look familiar to me,
I'll approach and I'm like, hey, are you this person?
Speaker 3 (13:23):
I think I know you? And that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I approached her and I was like Daisy, and then
she was like she looked at me and she turned around.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
She was like Lally, So we're all like, oh, we
recognize each other.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Lolly and Daisy had a lot to catch up on
and they only had the length of a bus ride
to do it. Lollie didn't want to waste any time,
so she went straight to the big questions on.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
The type of friends that when you catch up, how
you been, what are you up to? Are you dating anyone?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
You know?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Like those are the main questions for me to know,
like how are you doing emotionally physically and love life?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Like are you someone? Are you happy? Are you single?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Like yeah, and she was just like, oh, yeah, I
have a boyfriend her name is he's older than me.
And then she used to me like, oh, like sometimes
she's just a little processive, you know, like she like
kind of downd it down a little bit.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
But that's why I didn't think much of it, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, I don't know if her friends knew what was
going on with Victor.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
I feel like maybe it should have known.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
It sounded like a lot of Bagh school relationships, including
her own, full of drama and security and intensity.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
I think much of it because I was like, Okay,
like when in high school, we all have problems with
the partners, you know, Like at that moment, I was
a little possessive as well, not like you know, like
crazy posessive, but I do suffer from depression and like
I have a HD, I have a little bit of anger.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
She was so like, it just takes time to work
on like yourself.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
So I kind of understood her, and I was, okay,
maybe he just is going through a little face.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Maybe he has to work on it. So they didn't
think much of it.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
But then during that past ride days they can fight
it a little more.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And then she just told me that she wasn't sure
about it because of how he was, you know, he
told She told.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Me that she didn't like how he was sometimes.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
That he will get like a little violent, and that
she was like, you know, thinking what she do and
stuff like that. And then I just told her, like
you ever need advice, you need help.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Let me know.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Lolly was concerned, but she knew that Daisy had a
close circle of friends at her high school, a big
support system. What she didn't know is that she was
one of the few people, maybe even the only one,
who Daisy talked about her relationship with. Maybe in hindsight,
it made a strange sort of sense.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Maybe she told me because I didn't know the guy.
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I feel like maybe that's what she told me because
she knew that I wasn't gonna go and tell other
people or they said, is having problems with her boyfriend,
because I didn't even know the people that she wasn't
in now with, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
But Lollie didn't know many of the details and the
truth of what was really going on. It was so
much worse than she I have imagined. One night during
the summer before Daisy's senior year of high school, her grandfather,
Juan de Lo, was asleep on the couch. Daisy's younger
(16:15):
brother began screaming at him to wake up.
Speaker 5 (16:19):
You see build me lazy okay.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Wan said that his grandson shouted, Grandpa, Grandpa, it's Victor.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
He hit Daisy.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Daisy's mother, Susie was in the car on her way home.
She got a call from her youngest son and heard
him shouting he hit her. He hit her with a skateboard.
When Susie got to the apartment complex, she saw blood
on the ground, but Daisy was nowhere to be found.
She had taken off running, just like Victor. To Susie,
it seems like Daisy was embarrassed, embarrassed that her younger
(16:54):
brother had witnessed what had happened. She was such a mature,
rough girl. Susie told me that for her, that was
embarrassing that she was getting hit by this person. Daisy's
mother and her grandfather and her little brother began running
after Daisy and Victor, chasing them down the street. Victor
eventually got away when they caught up with Daisy. She
(17:16):
was distraught the public spectacle of her family chasing her
and her boyfriend down the street. It probably added to
her embarrassment, and the last thing she wanted to do
was to talk about what had happened, or even to
seek treatment for it.
Speaker 5 (17:31):
Susie pleaded with her daughter.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
She wanted to see the wound on her head, but
Daisy wouldn't show her. She was covering it with a hat.
You need stitches, Susie told her.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
But Daisy did not want to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
It seemed like she was afraid of reporting the assault,
afraid of drawing even more attention to her injury and
what that might mean for her relationship. Finally, Susie made
a promise. She told her daughter that she wouldn't call
the police. She was bluffing. She had actually already called
the police. Problem was the police never showed up, she
(18:09):
told me. Daisy finally agreed to let her mother take
her to the emergency room, but when they got there,
Susie told me Daisy insisted to the medical staff that
nothing had happened, no assault had taken place. California law
requires registered nurses to make a report anytime they suspect
a patient has been injured as a result of abuse,
(18:30):
and that's regardless of whether the patient consents to it,
So it's unclear why a report was not taken, but
because there was no report made. This account of alleged
assault isn't based on any sort of official record. It's
based on my interviews with Daisy's mother, her grandfather, and
her youngest brother, who confirmed to me that he witnessed it. Jeffrey,
(18:54):
the teenager whose grandmother lived in the building, also witnessed
the attack, according to his mother. After Daisy got stitched
up at the hospital, Susie went to the La County
Sheriff's station in Compton. Since the hospital wouldn't file a
police report, she figured she'd go to the police herself.
But Susie said they told her, quote the same crap,
(19:15):
They can't make a report if the victim doesn't come forward.
Speaker 5 (19:18):
Susie was baffled.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Her daughter was a miner, and she'd been injured so
badly that she needed stitches. Wasn't that enough to file
a police report. Susie was not willing to take no
for an answer. She went to a different law enforcement agency,
the Huntington Park Police Department, in the city where Daisy
attended high school, but again, she said she was turned away.
(19:41):
The police department declined to file a report or press
charges without the cooperation of the victim. I asked the
Huntington Park Police Department about this. A media spokesperson said
they don't comment on incidents involving miners, but a lieutenant
did tell me that this kind of situation quote, it's
not really spelled out in a policy. He described it
(20:01):
as a gray area, meaning if a parent comes in
to report a crime against their child and the child
doesn't want to provide a statement, police might not be
able to gather information.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
For a police report.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
When Daisy returned in the fall for her senior year
of high school, she was called into the principal's office.
When she got there, school administrators wanted to ask her
about the alleged assault. She said she didn't know what
they were talking about, and that's when, according to Susie,
Daisy was told that they had already interviewed her younger
brother and he said the attack did happen. Was she
(20:41):
calling her brother a liar? This confrontation, it was all
a set up. It had been masterminded by Susie. She
told me that she had approched school administrators for help
in making a record of the alleged assault. These administrators
did not comment on or corroborate this incident, citing student confidentiality.
According to Susie, her daughter cracked under the pressure. She
(21:05):
told them, no, my brother is not a liar, and yes,
what he says did happen.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Victor was banned from entering the.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Campus as a result, Susie told me, and she also
banned him from entering her home. And it was roughly
around this time, maybe just a few weeks earlier, that
Victor posted this really cryptic.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Image on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It was this old school tattoo style illustration of this
guy holding two different theater masks.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
Maybe you've seen this kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
It's like a happy mask in one hand and a
sad mask in the other, and there's this text across
it that says smile now, cry later, and then the
caption says not allowed to see my girlfriend no more.
And then there's this hand clapping emoji and an hourglass emoji.
The whole thing is really ominous, Like was it some
(21:58):
kind of threat of Tie running out? It's impossible to
know for sure what he meant by this, and it's
also impossible to know how exactly this whole experience affected Daisy.
It had to have been incredibly difficult, and it seems
like at that point, you know, she was already struggling
with this relationship, with whether to stay, how to go,
(22:23):
And I just wonder, is this the thing that made
her see clearly gravely I need to get out. But
getting out of a bad relationship, it takes time. In
Daisy's case, it happened about two and a half years
after the alleged assault with the skateboard. It was early
(22:47):
twenty twenty one. We were driving. Susie told me she
was like, by the way I broke up with what's's face.
Susie told me that Daisy didn't even like to mention
Victor by name because she knew her mother disliked himself
so much. Inside, Susie said, she was jumping up and
down at this news, but she didn't want to show
(23:07):
Daisy how excited she was. Teenagers are weird, Susie said.
The more you tell them not to do something, the
more they want to do it, and vice versa. So
Susie kept driving. She tried her best to hide her
smile and act casual. She kept her hands on the
steering wheel, she looked straight ahead. And besides, it wasn't
the first time that Daisy and Victor had broken up,
(23:29):
but something about this time felt different, more real or final.
Maybe it was the fact that Daisy seemed like she
had so many more options in her life now. She'd
made friends in her college classes, she'd gotten a job,
at CBS, and she had coworkers that she really liked.
(23:51):
There was something else that Daisy did that silently suggested
this breakup was the real thing. She deleted all of
her photos of Victor on Instagram. One of Daisy's friends
told me that she clocked this immediately. Daisy never said
a word to her about the breakup. She didn't need to.
Her social media said it all. Her and Victor were over.
(24:14):
The oldest remaining post on Daisy's grid after she deleted
everything else, was a sealthie. It was posted on February third,
twenty twenty one, which was roughly around the time she
broke up with Victor. The photo didn't show her face,
but it did show a purple key hanging from a
chain around her neck, a moon and bat tattoo on
(24:35):
her clavicle, a spider web inked across her shoulder. The
caption on its way to happiness. At the time that
she posted this image and caption, it was when her
break at East de Lehih College, But Daisy was not
taking a break. She was enrolled in a course called
(24:56):
Management for Small Business Entrepreneurship. In other words, she was
on her grind. She wanted to own her own salon
one day, and this was one step along the way.
And this class was intense. What was normally four months
of instruction was crammed into just five weeks.
Speaker 6 (25:14):
Some students in the first three weeks so drop out.
What they realized, like, oh, I thought it was just
going to be an easy, five week, easier class.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
That's Frank Ageray. He's the chair of easter La College's
Business Administration program. He's got dark, slipped back hair, and
he wore polo shirt printed with the college's mascot, a Husky.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Our business administration degree is one of the most popular
degrees on campus, and so we're also one of the
biggest community colleges in the state, maybe like the third
largest in the country.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Frank didn't get to know Daisy well. This class was
only five weeks long and it was also completely online.
This was still less than a year into the pandemic,
so that was the norm. But he did try to
get to know all of his students to understand the
reasoning for taking his class, and one way that he
did that was by asking them all to submit a
(26:07):
questionnaire to tell him about their background and interests, to
name something unique about themselves. Of course, I wanted to
know what Daisy had written in hers Well, I can read.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
You what she said here.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
She has a picture.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
She's my Daisy Dela.
Speaker 7 (26:24):
Oh.
Speaker 6 (26:24):
The reason I'm taking this course is because I would
like more knowledge how small businesses run. On my personal
entrepreneurship opportunities. My plans are to get a bachelor's or
master's in business.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
I do plan on.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Transferring to CLA, Stanford, you see San Diego, and my
free time I enjoy drawing, skating and reading something unique
about me as I am creative.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I didn't really she wanted to go to bachelor's and
go to Stanford or UCLA or you see San Diego.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
And do you mind if that's what her photo.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Looked like, because I know she changed her hair color
all the time.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Can I see? Yeah? Of course?
Speaker 5 (27:00):
Oh wow, I hadn't seen that photo.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Okay, so she has kind of the blonde in the
front and the.
Speaker 5 (27:06):
Black on the sides. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
I stared at this photo of this nineteen year old
woman with so many dreams, so much life ahead of her.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
I thought about how the.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
World was just beginning to open itself up to her
to become so much bigger.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
I thought about how she had.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Recently made this big decision to leave a partner who,
by many accounts had been abusive to her, and how
difficult that must have been. I thought about the injustice
of it all. Just three weeks after this class ended,
her life would be taken from her and to a
lot of people who knew Daisy. It seemed like the
(27:50):
cops were willing to let her case go cold, not
if they could help it.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
Next time. On My Friend Daisy, it was hard.
Speaker 8 (28:05):
And especially because where it happened. It was like where
she was living, and it's like what, like how can
it happen? And nobody sawn the thing, nobody heard anything.
Speaker 7 (28:18):
Hi, everyone, this is Paris. Thanks for listening to My
Friend Daisy. If you are someone you love is experiencing abuse,
you are not alone. Help is available twenty four to seven.
Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.
Call eight hundred seven nine to nine seven two three three,
text start to eight eight seven eight eight, or visit
(28:40):
the hotline dot org your safety matters reach out today.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with
support from Sony Music.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
Entertainment.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
It's reported, written and executive produced by me Jen Swan.
I'm also your host. Executive producers for London Audio are
Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker. Our
executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch. Our
associate producer is Zoe Coulkin. Production assistants and translations by
(29:17):
Miguel Contreras, sound design, composing and mixing by Hans Dale
she Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton. Our head of
production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager is Tamika
Balance Colosny. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily Rossick and
Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley Greenberg at Uta,
(29:41):
and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
This episode contains descriptions of intimate partner violence. Please listen
with care.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
My name is Lali rolon By. They coming Lally, so
a lot of people like it. Ever hit me as
Sally and they were like, oh, yeah, Lally. She went
to school with her.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
The person that Lollie went to school with was Daisy.
They met in the seventh grade when they get home
room together and.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
For some reason we ended up sitting in the same
table and we ended up talking, you know, and to me,
she was really beautiful. She had beautiful eyes. Her eyes
or what caught my attention. I was like wow, and
we started getting close. She was so like nice, caring.
She would always ask me like, you know, like those
type of going friends, how are you doing, how are
(00:43):
you feeling? And like when I would talk to her,
it was all like smiles, you know, like laughs and
smiles and everything.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
And then we ended up getting closer in eighth grade
because I.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Had her for keea junior High was more than a
decade ago for Lollie. She's in her early twenties now.
She's got wavy brown hair parted down the middle, and
on the day that we met, she wore a Whitney
Houston t shirt. She wants to be a nurse someday,
delivering babies, but for the time being, she delivers something else,
food from local restaurants that's in between classes at East
(01:15):
La College. I first reached out to Lali on TikTok.
Her profile is filled with funny, candid videos, nothing too edited,
nothing too trendy, just snippets of everyday life. A friend
walking around with a paper bag over her head, soccer
teammates banging on plastic bottles to make an ASMR drum beat.
Lalie and I met up at a coffee shop in
(01:36):
Huntington Park. It's a working class suburb just a few
miles south of downtown Los Angeles. We sat at an
outdoor table on Pacific Boulevard, the main shopping district. It's
filled with signs and Spanish advertising, tax lawyers and passport photos.
There are huge, glittery boutiques that sell tuxedos and princess
like Kinsaniera addresses. The business is here cater to a
(01:59):
population of mostly immigrants, like Lolly's family they're from Tebasco, Mexico,
and Daisy's family back when they lived here, they're from
Mexico City. Daisy and Lolly bonded instantly. They had the
kind of closeness where they could spend hours together, sometimes
without even saying a word. But there were times when
Lollie wondered if there was more going on with Daisy
(02:20):
than she let on.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
I feel like she never really told me what was
going on, deep deep inside. Maybe she didn't want people
to know him. Maybe she wanted to make it seem
like she was always fine, you know, because that's what.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
She seemed like. It seemed like she was always okay.
It seemed like she was always happy.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
This idea that Daisy always put on a smile no
matter what it was something that came up a lot
when I spoke to her friends.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
She could have been going through problems and she'd put
yours before hers. You know, she wouldn't even tell you
about hers to help you with yours. So I feel
like that shows a lot. There's not a lot of
people that would do that. You know, a lot of
people just focus on them, like all my problems, my problems,
and when you talking about yours, like, oh no, not
right now, like I'm talking about mine.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
And Lolly and Daisy drifted apart in high school, Lollie
went to one school, Daisy to another. But Daisy always
stayed on Lolly's mind.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
But that love that I had for her from elementary,
middle school, whatever, is always there.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
You know, It's always gonna stay there.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Even just because of when I suparate, way doesn't mean
that I'm ever gonna forget about her.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Because even even.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Daisy and Lolly went ended up having a chance encounter
in high school. In this encounter, it shed light on
Daisy's inner life, on one of the difficult things that
she was struggling with in the years after they lost touch.
It still haunts Lolly today.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
When I found out what happened, That's when I was
like down like, I felt guilty.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I felt remorse. When I was like down like, I
wondered if I could have helped her.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I'm Jen Swan from London Audio. iHeart Radio an executive
producer Para Selton. This is My Friend Daisy, Episode three,
Smile Now I'll cry Later. Valerie Ariano was two grades
above Daisy. She was a sophomore in high school when
(04:12):
Daisy was in the eighth grade.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
She was still a little kid, still with her little
She hadn't had her hair died yet, and I would
see her like in the school uniform. She was so
sweet and innocent.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
It's possible that the two might never have met if
Valerie's best friend didn't end up getting pregnant. The father
was Daisy's older brother.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I was worried for my friend, you know, having a
kid so young, because you were like fifteen or sixteen,
and Daisy was I think barely thirteen. So I did
worry about my friend going through something like that so young.
But I think I felt a little bit calmer seeing
that she had Daisy there. She was living with her
(04:53):
at the time, and I felt like Daisy kind of
in a way became like another sister for her, you know.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
When the baby was born in the fall of twenty fifteen,
Daisy embraced being an aunt. Later she would even get
a tattoo of the baby's name. Daisy adored the baby's
mother too. She got a septum ring just like her,
and started dying.
Speaker 5 (05:15):
Her hair like her too.
Speaker 4 (05:16):
I'm pretty sure she was already interested in that stuff,
but I think living with my friend, and because my
friend would dye her hair all the time too, she'll
have it like so burnt from like dying you red,
having a blonde, dying of blue, green, purple.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I'm laughing because I can relate. My hair was also
fried in high school. Honestly, my brain was probably a
little fried too, from all the bleach I put on
my head, followed by clumps of manic panic and neon shades.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
And I started seeing Daisy dress up like tat too,
and she looks so cool. And I remember she would
dye her hair like all these different kinds of colors,
and at one point she had a blonde, and she
kind of reminded me of like Courtney Love. I don't
know if some people take that as a fence or compliment.
She looked really cute, though.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Valeries, in her mid twenties, was short, curly bangs and
thick care that when we met she wore in two braids.
I had messaged Valerie on Facebook after noticing that she
donated to the GoFundMe that Daisy's mother had started to
help with her funeral costs. Valerie's Facebook page is like
a community bulletin board. She often reposts flyers about missing
(06:25):
people and lost pets, PSAs about shelter animals that need homes,
and in person she was just as sensitive and caring
as her online profile suggested. A few years back, she
told me she started studying sociology at cal State LA
because she wanted to work in homeless services. Then she
got disillusion and switched over to art education. She wants
(06:47):
to get her teaching credential someday to work in a
field where she can really.
Speaker 5 (06:51):
Have an impact and make a difference.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
We sat at a picnic table outside the Civic Center
in Huntington Park. That's where Valerie grew up and where
she still lives, and she told me about the first
time she met Daisy, about how she watched as Daisy's
style and musical tastes began to evolve.
Speaker 5 (07:10):
Go'll see her.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Wear like Nirvana's shirts. I would be wearing those shirts
of the Smiths, and she would ask me like, oh,
where did you buy that shirt?
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Not I would tell her like, oh.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
I'm Pacific nearby walking distance, And I started seeing her
wear shirts of the Smiths too.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
With her tough exterior, Daisy sometimes gave off the ear
of someone who was unfazed self a shirt, but underneath
it all, she was going through a lot. It seems
like she was probably dealing with a lot of uncertainty.
Her parents were getting a divorce after nearly two decades
of marriage. It was finalized in the summer of twenty seventeen,
and based on what I've heard from Daisy's mother, Susie,
(07:52):
it must have been hard on Daisy. I haven't been
able to reach her father. I asked his father, Juan
de lo Oh, to help us get in touch her back.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
But from what.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Susie told me, Daisy used to be very close with
her father. A daddy's girl is how she put it.
She was really like this with her dad, she told me,
crossing her index and middle fingers together. But after the split,
Susie and Daisy got a lot closer. They ended up
moving in with Daisy's grandparents in Compton. It was a
tight squeeze, but it was at least familiar. They'd all
(08:24):
lived there for a time when Daisy and her siblings
were younger. Susie told me that in order to maintain
a sense of normalcy, she decided not to take her
kids out of the schools they were already enrolled in.
Now Daisy had to commute to school from a different city,
Huntingdon Park, was a straight shot on the bus eight
miles north along Beach Boulevard until it turned into Pacific.
(08:45):
The drive took a half hour by car, or sometimes
an hour on public transit. It's hard to imagine this
was an easy transition. Daisy was living far from her friends,
her school, her community, and now she had to navigate
a new living arrangement with extend family members she didn't
always get along with. But around this time, when Daisy
was a sophomore in high school, she began dating somebody
(09:08):
that seemed to bring her comfort, at least in the beginning.
When she introduced her mother to her boyfriend, she said
that he was seventeen, just two years older than she was,
and at first Susie had no reason to doubt that.
Victor Sosa looked like your average teenage skateboarder. Could carried
(09:28):
a skateboard with him wherever he went. He had thick
eyebrows and a thin mustache. He sometimes grew his dark
lady hair past his shoulders. But the thing that everybody
noticed about him was his ear lobes. They'd been stretched
engaged with jewelry. It looked like big black discs. His
(09:49):
appearance didn't bother, Susie, she was actually suspicious of him
for another reason. He was too quiet, she told me,
And pretty soon she began to notice things about him
that made her suspect he was a lot older than seventeen.
I saw tattoos on him, she told me, a lot
of tattoos, and I'm like, how old is he?
Speaker 5 (10:10):
For real?
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Susie would later discover that her daughter had lied to
her about her boyfriend's age. He was already twenty one
when Daisy was fifteen. Susie had always felt like she
and her daughter run a team, but after Victor came
into the picture, she no longer felt that way. It
seemed like everything had changed. Susie had been working long
(10:31):
hours to make ends meet. She was seeing less and
less of her daughter, and when they did hang out,
Daisy never wanted to talk about Victor. Susie told me.
A number of Daisy's friends told me the same thing,
that Victor was a topic that was always off limits.
They didn't know much about him, and they weren't even
really sure how the two of them met, but they
(10:52):
knew better than.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
To ask about it. When they did, Daisy.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Sometimes told them that he wasn't worth talking about but
Victor clearly didn't feel that way about Daisy. It was
like he wanted the whole world to know about his relationship,
because on Instagram he filled his grid with photos of
her Daisy with her hair bleached blonde and then dyed
jack lantern orange daisy and fishnets climbing a fence, Daisy
(11:18):
and fishnets on a beach, Daisy in an antique shop,
a little yellow daisy propped in the buttonhole of her
jeene jacket. His Instagram contained a few photos of himself too.
There was one photo that showed off his tattoos on
his leg, an image of Jason the Killer from Friday
the thirteenth, two blades arranged like crossbones under a hockey
(11:39):
mask across as abdomen, an outline of the Grim Reaper.
It seemed like he had a thing for horror movies,
right down to the clothes he wore. He even sometimes
dressed like Freddy Krueger in a red striped sweater and
bowler hat. His look sometimes freaked people out, like Jose Tayas,
the apartment manag at Daisy's building. He'd sometimes see Victor
(12:02):
hanging around the apartment complex with Daisy and he was
not into it. I see his black grass and looked
like a shadow.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Looked like a different along the people.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
He dressed in all black, like a shadow, Jose said.
Then he compared Victor to the Undertaker, the wrestler who
entered the ring in a black leather trench coat and
top hat. Daisy's style had become a little theatrical too.
Her hair was cut short and asymmetrical, and her makeup
was dark and bold. She looked a little like the
(12:39):
nineteen eighties punk singer Susi Sue. By her junior year
of high school, she had changed her looks so much
that Lolly, her friend from middle school, had to do
a double take when she spotted Daisy on the bus.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
I only recognized her because of her eyes. Her appearance
was completely different, her hair was dye, her makeup was
like at that moment, to me, it was like a
little like I thought about it crazy and in a sense,
you know, but now that I think about like, it's
not crazy.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
It was just her expressive how she felt, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
She and Daisy hadn't seen each other in yours and
Lollly wasn't even sure if it was really Daisy.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
She was seeing on a.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Type of person that if you look familiar to me,
I'll approach and I'm like, hey, are you this person?
Speaker 3 (13:23):
I think I know you? And that's what I did.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I approached her and I was like Daisy, and then
she was like she looked at me and she turned around.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
She was like Lally, So we're all like, oh, we
recognize each other.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Lolly and Daisy had a lot to catch up on
and they only had the length of a bus ride
to do it. Lollie didn't want to waste any time,
so she went straight to the big questions on.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
The type of friends that when you catch up, how
you been, what are you up to? Are you dating anyone?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
You know?
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Like those are the main questions for me to know,
like how are you doing emotionally physically and love life?
Speaker 3 (13:54):
Like are you someone? Are you happy? Are you single?
Speaker 2 (13:56):
Like yeah, and she was just like, oh, yeah, I
have a boyfriend her name is he's older than me.
And then she used to me like, oh, like sometimes
she's just a little processive, you know, like she like
kind of downd it down a little bit.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
But that's why I didn't think much of it, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, I don't know if her friends knew what was
going on with Victor.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
I feel like maybe it should have known.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
It sounded like a lot of Bagh school relationships, including
her own, full of drama and security and intensity.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
I think much of it because I was like, Okay,
like when in high school, we all have problems with
the partners, you know, Like at that moment, I was
a little possessive as well, not like you know, like
crazy posessive, but I do suffer from depression and like
I have a HD, I have a little bit of anger.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
She was so like, it just takes time to work
on like yourself.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
So I kind of understood her, and I was, okay,
maybe he just is going through a little face.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
Maybe he has to work on it. So they didn't
think much of it.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
But then during that past ride days they can fight
it a little more.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
And then she just told me that she wasn't sure
about it because of how he was, you know, he
told She told.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Me that she didn't like how he was sometimes.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
That he will get like a little violent, and that
she was like, you know, thinking what she do and
stuff like that. And then I just told her, like
you ever need advice, you need help.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Let me know.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Lolly was concerned, but she knew that Daisy had a
close circle of friends at her high school, a big
support system. What she didn't know is that she was
one of the few people, maybe even the only one,
who Daisy talked about her relationship with. Maybe in hindsight,
it made a strange sort of sense.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Maybe she told me because I didn't know the guy.
You know.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
I feel like maybe that's what she told me because
she knew that I wasn't gonna go and tell other
people or they said, is having problems with her boyfriend,
because I didn't even know the people that she wasn't
in now with, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
But Lollie didn't know many of the details and the
truth of what was really going on. It was so
much worse than she I have imagined. One night during
the summer before Daisy's senior year of high school, her grandfather,
Juan de Lo, was asleep on the couch. Daisy's younger
(16:15):
brother began screaming at him to wake up.
Speaker 5 (16:19):
You see build me lazy okay.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Wan said that his grandson shouted, Grandpa, Grandpa, it's Victor.
Speaker 5 (16:30):
He hit Daisy.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Daisy's mother, Susie was in the car on her way home.
She got a call from her youngest son and heard
him shouting he hit her. He hit her with a skateboard.
When Susie got to the apartment complex, she saw blood
on the ground, but Daisy was nowhere to be found.
She had taken off running, just like Victor. To Susie,
it seems like Daisy was embarrassed, embarrassed that her younger
(16:54):
brother had witnessed what had happened. She was such a mature,
rough girl. Susie told me that for her, that was
embarrassing that she was getting hit by this person. Daisy's
mother and her grandfather and her little brother began running
after Daisy and Victor, chasing them down the street. Victor
eventually got away when they caught up with Daisy. She
(17:16):
was distraught the public spectacle of her family chasing her
and her boyfriend down the street. It probably added to
her embarrassment, and the last thing she wanted to do
was to talk about what had happened, or even to
seek treatment for it.
Speaker 5 (17:31):
Susie pleaded with her daughter.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
She wanted to see the wound on her head, but
Daisy wouldn't show her. She was covering it with a hat.
You need stitches, Susie told her.
Speaker 5 (17:43):
But Daisy did not want to go to the hospital.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
It seemed like she was afraid of reporting the assault,
afraid of drawing even more attention to her injury and
what that might mean for her relationship. Finally, Susie made
a promise. She told her daughter that she wouldn't call
the police. She was bluffing. She had actually already called
the police. Problem was the police never showed up, she
(18:09):
told me. Daisy finally agreed to let her mother take
her to the emergency room, but when they got there,
Susie told me Daisy insisted to the medical staff that
nothing had happened, no assault had taken place. California law
requires registered nurses to make a report anytime they suspect
a patient has been injured as a result of abuse,
(18:30):
and that's regardless of whether the patient consents to it,
So it's unclear why a report was not taken, but
because there was no report made. This account of alleged
assault isn't based on any sort of official record. It's
based on my interviews with Daisy's mother, her grandfather, and
her youngest brother, who confirmed to me that he witnessed it. Jeffrey,
(18:54):
the teenager whose grandmother lived in the building, also witnessed
the attack, according to his mother. After Daisy got stitched
up at the hospital, Susie went to the La County
Sheriff's station in Compton. Since the hospital wouldn't file a
police report, she figured she'd go to the police herself.
But Susie said they told her, quote the same crap,
(19:15):
They can't make a report if the victim doesn't come forward.
Speaker 5 (19:18):
Susie was baffled.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Her daughter was a miner, and she'd been injured so
badly that she needed stitches. Wasn't that enough to file
a police report. Susie was not willing to take no
for an answer. She went to a different law enforcement agency,
the Huntington Park Police Department, in the city where Daisy
attended high school, but again, she said she was turned away.
(19:41):
The police department declined to file a report or press
charges without the cooperation of the victim. I asked the
Huntington Park Police Department about this. A media spokesperson said
they don't comment on incidents involving miners, but a lieutenant
did tell me that this kind of situation quote, it's
not really spelled out in a policy. He described it
(20:01):
as a gray area, meaning if a parent comes in
to report a crime against their child and the child
doesn't want to provide a statement, police might not be
able to gather information.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
For a police report.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
When Daisy returned in the fall for her senior year
of high school, she was called into the principal's office.
When she got there, school administrators wanted to ask her
about the alleged assault. She said she didn't know what
they were talking about, and that's when, according to Susie,
Daisy was told that they had already interviewed her younger
brother and he said the attack did happen. Was she
(20:41):
calling her brother a liar? This confrontation, it was all
a set up. It had been masterminded by Susie. She
told me that she had approched school administrators for help
in making a record of the alleged assault. These administrators
did not comment on or corroborate this incident, citing student confidentiality.
According to Susie, her daughter cracked under the pressure. She
(21:05):
told them, no, my brother is not a liar, and yes,
what he says did happen.
Speaker 5 (21:12):
Victor was banned from entering the.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Campus as a result, Susie told me, and she also
banned him from entering her home. And it was roughly
around this time, maybe just a few weeks earlier, that
Victor posted this really cryptic.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
Image on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
It was this old school tattoo style illustration of this
guy holding two different theater masks.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
Maybe you've seen this kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
It's like a happy mask in one hand and a
sad mask in the other, and there's this text across
it that says smile now, cry later, and then the
caption says not allowed to see my girlfriend no more.
And then there's this hand clapping emoji and an hourglass emoji.
The whole thing is really ominous, Like was it some
(21:58):
kind of threat of Tie running out? It's impossible to
know for sure what he meant by this, and it's
also impossible to know how exactly this whole experience affected Daisy.
It had to have been incredibly difficult, and it seems
like at that point, you know, she was already struggling
with this relationship, with whether to stay, how to go,
(22:23):
And I just wonder, is this the thing that made
her see clearly gravely I need to get out. But
getting out of a bad relationship, it takes time. In
Daisy's case, it happened about two and a half years
after the alleged assault with the skateboard. It was early
(22:47):
twenty twenty one. We were driving. Susie told me she
was like, by the way I broke up with what's's face.
Susie told me that Daisy didn't even like to mention
Victor by name because she knew her mother disliked himself
so much. Inside, Susie said, she was jumping up and
down at this news, but she didn't want to show
(23:07):
Daisy how excited she was. Teenagers are weird, Susie said.
The more you tell them not to do something, the
more they want to do it, and vice versa. So
Susie kept driving. She tried her best to hide her
smile and act casual. She kept her hands on the
steering wheel, she looked straight ahead. And besides, it wasn't
the first time that Daisy and Victor had broken up,
(23:29):
but something about this time felt different, more real or final.
Maybe it was the fact that Daisy seemed like she
had so many more options in her life now. She'd
made friends in her college classes, she'd gotten a job,
at CBS, and she had coworkers that she really liked.
(23:51):
There was something else that Daisy did that silently suggested
this breakup was the real thing. She deleted all of
her photos of Victor on Instagram. One of Daisy's friends
told me that she clocked this immediately. Daisy never said
a word to her about the breakup. She didn't need to.
Her social media said it all. Her and Victor were over.
(24:14):
The oldest remaining post on Daisy's grid after she deleted
everything else, was a sealthie. It was posted on February third,
twenty twenty one, which was roughly around the time she
broke up with Victor. The photo didn't show her face,
but it did show a purple key hanging from a
chain around her neck, a moon and bat tattoo on
(24:35):
her clavicle, a spider web inked across her shoulder. The
caption on its way to happiness. At the time that
she posted this image and caption, it was when her
break at East de Lehih College, But Daisy was not
taking a break. She was enrolled in a course called
(24:56):
Management for Small Business Entrepreneurship. In other words, she was
on her grind. She wanted to own her own salon
one day, and this was one step along the way.
And this class was intense. What was normally four months
of instruction was crammed into just five weeks.
Speaker 6 (25:14):
Some students in the first three weeks so drop out.
What they realized, like, oh, I thought it was just
going to be an easy, five week, easier class.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
That's Frank Ageray. He's the chair of easter La College's
Business Administration program. He's got dark, slipped back hair, and
he wore polo shirt printed with the college's mascot, a Husky.
Speaker 6 (25:33):
Our business administration degree is one of the most popular
degrees on campus, and so we're also one of the
biggest community colleges in the state, maybe like the third
largest in the country.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Frank didn't get to know Daisy well. This class was
only five weeks long and it was also completely online.
This was still less than a year into the pandemic,
so that was the norm. But he did try to
get to know all of his students to understand the
reasoning for taking his class, and one way that he
did that was by asking them all to submit a
(26:07):
questionnaire to tell him about their background and interests, to
name something unique about themselves. Of course, I wanted to
know what Daisy had written in hers Well, I can read.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
You what she said here.
Speaker 6 (26:20):
She has a picture.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
She's my Daisy Dela.
Speaker 7 (26:24):
Oh.
Speaker 6 (26:24):
The reason I'm taking this course is because I would
like more knowledge how small businesses run. On my personal
entrepreneurship opportunities. My plans are to get a bachelor's or
master's in business.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
I do plan on.
Speaker 6 (26:36):
Transferring to CLA, Stanford, you see San Diego, and my
free time I enjoy drawing, skating and reading something unique
about me as I am creative.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I didn't really she wanted to go to bachelor's and
go to Stanford or UCLA or you see San Diego.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
And do you mind if that's what her photo.
Speaker 5 (26:55):
Looked like, because I know she changed her hair color
all the time.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Can I see? Yeah? Of course?
Speaker 5 (27:00):
Oh wow, I hadn't seen that photo.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
Okay, so she has kind of the blonde in the
front and the.
Speaker 5 (27:06):
Black on the sides. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
I stared at this photo of this nineteen year old
woman with so many dreams, so much life ahead of her.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
I thought about how the.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
World was just beginning to open itself up to her
to become so much bigger.
Speaker 5 (27:26):
I thought about how she had.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Recently made this big decision to leave a partner who,
by many accounts had been abusive to her, and how
difficult that must have been. I thought about the injustice
of it all. Just three weeks after this class ended,
her life would be taken from her and to a
lot of people who knew Daisy. It seemed like the
(27:50):
cops were willing to let her case go cold, not
if they could help it.
Speaker 5 (28:00):
Next time. On My Friend Daisy, it was hard.
Speaker 8 (28:05):
And especially because where it happened. It was like where
she was living, and it's like what, like how can
it happen? And nobody sawn the thing, nobody heard anything.
Speaker 7 (28:18):
Hi, everyone, this is Paris. Thanks for listening to My
Friend Daisy. If you are someone you love is experiencing abuse,
you are not alone. Help is available twenty four to seven.
Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline for free confidential support.
Call eight hundred seven nine to nine seven two three three,
text start to eight eight seven eight eight, or visit
(28:40):
the hotline dot org your safety matters reach out today.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with
support from Sony Music.
Speaker 5 (28:52):
Entertainment.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
It's reported, written and executive produced by me Jen Swan.
I'm also your host. Executive producers for London Audio are
Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh Bruce Robertson and Joanna Studebaker. Our
executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment is Jonathan Hirsch. Our
associate producer is Zoe Coulkin. Production assistants and translations by
(29:17):
Miguel Contreras, sound design, composing and mixing by Hans Dale
she Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton. Our head of
production is Sammy Allison, and our production manager is Tamika
Balance Colosny. Special thanks to Steve Akerman, Emily Rossick and
Jamie Myers at Sony, Ben Goldberg and Orley Greenberg at Uta,
(29:41):
and Jen Ortiz at The Cut
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