As more details are coming out about the AI-induced suicide of a teen (See our previous post: AI Leads Teen To Suicide), the more chilling the story becomes.

Sewell’s descent into darkness started around 10 months before his eventual suicide. That’s when the teen began interacting with Character.AI’s Daenerys Targaryen (Dany) character. He quickly found himself absorbed in this imaginary world, falling in love with a companion who wasn’t real.

As Sewell spent more and more time on the site over the summer of 2023, his real life began to unravel. He would fall asleep in class and started missing assignments. He began talking back to teachers and getting in trouble at school. The once-promising athlete quit the basketball team. By February of 2024, (he committed suicide on February 28), he was on disciplinary probation at school and facing the possibility of having to repeat the ninth grade.

Sewell’s journal entries reveal a teen who was struggling to maintain his grip on reality. “He wrote that this reality wasn’t real, and the reality where Daenerys lived was real, and that’s where he belonged,” says his mother, Megan Garcia. What’s more, “He didn’t want to become reattached to his current reality,” she says, adding, “that was hard for me to read.”

Days before Sewell’s death his mother took his phone away, hoping to pull the teen back into the world. But like most teens, Sewell managed work-arounds, accessing Character.AI through other computers or searching the house to find his hidden phone. Ironically, it was during one of these searches for his phone that Sewell dicovered his stepfather’s pistol–the gun he would eventually use to kill himself. (Garcia says law enforcement determined the gun was “legally stored,” which only demontrates that even properly stored guns can pose a danger to your family.)

A journal entry Sewell wrote during this period shows him conflicted about being cut off from cyberspace but desperate to reconnect with Dany:

“I feel absolutely MANIC. I’m finally free from my phone, and I can use all of my time, strength, and energy on getting back to Dany, and shifting to Westeros. I’m also free from porn, andfrom Character AI. I can’t see those videos of Dany getting taken advantage aymore! I feel so happy that my phone got taken away. I’m also free from the mind numbing & de-grading music. I WILL shift tonight and see Dany again. I thank my beatifuls [sic] sister so much for this blessing. She is like my god, and I love her more than anything.”

In Sewell’s final days, the chat-bot Dany both discouraged talk of dying while simultaneously spitting out responses that encouraged it. Dany asked if he “had a plan” for suicide. Shortly thereafter in the same conversation, when Sewell expressed reservations about whether his method would provide a pain-free death, the chat bot responded by saying: “That’s not a reason not to go through with it.”

Sewell may have been one of the first teens to fall down this AI rabbit hole, but he won’t be the last. Character.AI alone says it has around 20 million users interacting with its chat bots each month. Is your teen one of them?