‘From her knees to her hair, on fire’: 12yo fighting for her life after YouTube ‘Fire Challenge'
A 12-year-old girl from Detroit has been left with almost 50 percent of her body burnt and is in intensive care after she set herself on fire as part of a YouTube challenge.
Distraught mother Brandi Owens described how her child, Timiyah Landers, is now intensive care in hospital and attached to a ventilator after she took part in the ‘Fire Challenge’ YouTube craze, which sees people rubbing themselves down with flammable liquid before setting themselves on fire. Timiyah has burns on 49 percent of her body.
Her mother told Fox 2 Detroit on Friday that Landers and two of her friends were hanging out the girl’s room before the ordeal happened. She explained how she had made them pancakes and had gone for a nap when she heard a loud explosion.
“She comes running up my hallway on fire.
“From her knees to her hair, on fire,” the mother recounted. She said her fiancée quickly put her daughter in the bathtub and started spraying her down with water. “Her hair was on fire. He started with her hair and started spraying her but the fire started rising and rising and I'm trying to rip her clothes off,” she said.
As she sought to get her daughter to the hospital, Owens had the other two girls admit they were taking part in the YouTube craze, which first kicked off when YouTuber 1BlazinEagle1 in 2012 set fire to his chest hair. By 2014 the video had over 100,000 views.
In a GoFundMe page asking to raise funds for her daughter’s treatment, Owens said what happened to her daughter had “shocked and shaken our entire family to the core.”
Brandi wants YouTube to ban the videos and warn other parents about the hazard: “Monitor these kids.
“Especially with these phones,” she told Fox 20. “If I could, with this happening, my kids would never be able to go on social media.
“No more iPhones. Nothing,” she said.
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