TikTok influencer sues to keep records about her son's death private
TikTok influencer Emilie Kiser is suing Arizona officials to keep records about her 3-year-old son's death private.
Earlier this month, Kiser's eldest son, Trigg, died several days after he was found unconscious in a backyard pool at the family's home in Chandler, about a 30-minute drive southeast of Phoenix, according to local reports.
Kiser shares her life as a mom on TikTok where she has four million followers.
On Tuesday, Kiser filed a lawsuit against Arizona officials, arguing the disclosure of records related to her son's death 'causes renewed trauma to surviving family members and violates their right to grieve privately.'
Kiser 'is going through a parent's worst nightmare right now' after the 'heartbreaking accidental drowning' of her son earlier this month, according to the suit.
The toddler died in hospital six days after he was found in the pool, KPNX reported.
'Emilie is trying her best to be there for her surviving son…but every day is a battle,' the lawsuit said. Kiser and husband, Brady, welcomed their second son, Theodore, in March.
Since Trigg's death, more than 100 public records requests have been filed with the city of Chandler and the Maricopa County Medical Examiner's Office.
"Emilie and her family desperately want to grieve in private, but sadly, the public will not let them. Trigg's death has become a media frenzy,' the suit read.
While the suit does acknowledge Arizona's Public Records Law, which gives the public the right to view records maintained by public offices, 'this right of access is not absolute.'
Kiser's lawyers argue Arizona law also, 'recognizes that family members have a compelling privacy interest in preventing the disclosure of graphic materials related to a loved one's injuries or death.'
Kiser has not posted on TikTok since May 12.
The suit names several Arizona public offices, including the city of Chandler, the Chandler Police Department, the Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner and the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Jason Berry, director of communications for Maricopa County, told NBC News on Thursday, 'When Maricopa County learned the family was pursuing a court order to prevent the release of these records, the Office of the Medical Examiner worked with the family to place a seal on the record.'
Berry said court proceedings will determine if the records related to Trigg's death will be permanently sealed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Funky little Arizona town is hailed the 'new Roswell' after strange UFO sightings
An Arizona town with fewer than 10,000 residents is being dubbed the new Roswell after becoming one of the top spots in the US for UFO sightings. The desert town of Sedona, which is located approximately 180 miles outside of Phoenix, sits in both Coconino and Yavapai Counties, which had a combined 484 UFO sightings between 2000 and 2023, according to an Axios report. These numbers put the area well above the national average of 34 people per 100,000. Psychic and UFO tour guide John Polk, 56, told that he sees extraterrestrial activity nightly from his home in Sedona, where he's lived for the last eight years. The native Floridian told 'There's tons of activity. It's easy to see it.' He believes Sedona is such a high-traffic area for UFOs due to the vortexes the city is known for. Sedona is also a very spiritual place and is known as the 'door to the world' due to vortexes that are believed to open portals to other dimensions and provide healing energy. Polk said Sedona has quartz along the ley lines - invisible gridlines that often fall into triangles that are believed to carry powerful energy - that help build electromagnetic energy that creates electricity, and ultimately, a pathway for ETs. 'I believe that's what's happening in Sedona,' Polk told 'They're traveling over the gridlines. 'The better the energy, the more you'll see.' The Daytona Beach native also noticed a lot of UFOs seem to appear and then suddenly disappear in thin air and he believes that's due to the mythical ley lines and that aliens are using them to slip between dimensions. He explained it like turning stations on a radio, which is done by change frequency and vibrations. 'I think that's what they can do,' he said. 'Everything is about vibrations and frequency.' Polk regularly leads tour groups of 20 to 50 people and prepares for a tour by meditating to bring the best results. He says that UFOs 'seem to follow' him. 'You'd see stuff whether I was here or not. But when I am there, you see a lot more because I know how to work the energy out there,' he said. For Polk, who moved to the city to live with his aunt who had breast cancer, he's always believed in UFOs and had his first encounter when he was around 15 or 16. While in his bed in Florida, he saw something that looked like the moon but was moving over the ocean. After blacking out, he claims he awoke to find three four-foot creatures standing on his balcony peering into the glass. They eventually came into his room before he blacked out again. 'I totally believed in them my whole life,' Polk said. His mother, who is also a psychic, believed in aliens too and he says she worked adjacently to the FBI for many years. She was privy to confidential information and a lot of what she told him growing up then came true, he claimed. His father, a university president, was always a skeptic, but that hasn't stopped Polk from inviting ETs in with 'love, light and consciousness'. Sedona has been likened to Roswell, New Mexico, which has the most famous potential alien spotting area in the US. An extraterrestrial spacecraft allegedly crashed there in July 1947 and many conspiracy theorists believe aliens were captured by the government and the military attempted to cover up the incident. The area is a hotspot for UFO sightings, with 92 residents per 100,000 spotting one between 2000 and 2023, according to Axios. There have also been claims that Sedona has an 'alien base' hidden just outside the town in a desolate area, The Daily Express reported. 'There's a base there where the crafts are, there's a number of them high in the mountains in remote areas of the planet and they're here now and they're extraordinarily distressed about the state of affairs [of humanity],' lawyer Danny Sheehan, who has worked on UFO whistleblowers cases, told The Express. He claimed 'huge, seven feet tall, extraordinarily skinny, thin, kind of bowed over and reminding people of a praying mantis' people live inside the base. The paranormal was not associated with Sedona until the 1970s when psychic Paige Bryant visited the town and declared certain places were vortexes. 'She was not drawing from anything other than what she said she intuited from the land and she described these as places that had a spiritual or mystical type of energy emanating from specific spots in around Sedona,' McGivney told radio show KJZZ. 'And, you know, coincidentally, she was not like a wilderness backpacker. So all the vortexes are conveniently one mile from the road.' She was not the first person to feel the special power of Sedona, but she was the first to name the experience. Before her the psychic researcher Dick Sutphen brought groups of people to the town for spiritual retreats to help them experience the psychic energy emitting from the place. Dennis Andres and his mother visited the city when he was moving to studying at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, he told Arizona State University. When they came across a rock formation in Bell Rock, he found himself getting out of the car to climb and as he went higher, he felt better. 'We asked people if something was happening in Sedona. And they would always respond it is the vortex,' he told the university. 'Sedona is a place of spiritual energy. We cannot measure it with mechanical devices; we can only measure it with the human body. I can explain why some people feel this energy and others do not. You do not have to believe in it, and you do not have to reject it either.'
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Should I crash my son's gap year?
An empty nest hits some parents harder than expected and Michelle Obama recently admitted to having therapy to deal with hers. I'm the same age as Mrs O, a 'nan-aged' empty-nester who had two sons in my late thirties and early forties. However, after the sudden accidental death of my elder son, Jackson, in September 2023, at the age of just 21, it's fair to say my nest is even emptier than the former first lady's. Emptier, indeed, than I ever imagined it could be. I haven't had therapy and found other ways to get through. Yet towards the end of 2024 I'd all but exhausted my coping strategies when my partner was suddenly diagnosed with cancer and rushed into surgery. To deal with yet more extreme stress I chose to retreat; to batten down the hatches to get through what promised to be another tough winter, at the end of the cruellest year of my life. If this wasn't tough enough, while navigating profound personal loss and illness I lost friendships too. Inevitably, as so many testing, unanticipated chapters of my life unfolded, not everybody in it was able to stay on the same page. Still, while in this peculiar holding pattern I had sufficient wherewithal to suggest to my 18-year-old son, Rider, that after the worst year of his life — coinciding with his A-levels — he should probably embark on his richly deserved gap year even sooner than he had planned. With my partner about to start three months of postoperative preventive chemotherapy and Rider's friends scattered to uni or on travels of their own, there was little to look forward to at home, in the House of Absolutely No Fun Whatsoever. The Bank of Mum and Dad — albeit separated and repartnered for many years — ensured Rider boarded a flight to Brisbane on December 5 last year. At the other end he was met by my Aussie half-brother, Jonny, sister-in-law, Felicity, and two of my three nephews, Dominic, 10, and Memphis, 14 months, whom I'd never even met myself. It had been 16 years since I'd last visited Australia (along with a six-year-old Jackson) and 12 years since my Australian family had visited me; the latest addition to their family was born exactly a month to the day after Jackson had died. Given that my Aussie-born, UK-based father died in 2019 and my Aussie mother (who returned to Australia 45 years ago) died in 2020, during Covid, what remained of my diminished gene pool was quite suddenly all on the other side of the world. While I was born in the UK and have lived the whole of my adult life here I felt an umbilical tug. The thing is, my earliest memories are of the year I spent in Oz, aged three, when my mother had a trial separation from my father and took me 'home' — she was a country girl, having grown up on an 80,000-acre sheep station on the New South Wales/Victoria border. My parents eventually reconciled (for a few years) and I returned from my free-range year roaming the Australian bush to the suburbs of London. Accessorised by a tan and a broad Aussie accent, I defaulted to 'steereo' for stereo (a word used more often in the 1960s/1970s than today!) for years. After his arrival I gave Rider long enough to get over the jet lag and used to the high-summer heat before I started begging for pictures and updates via WhatsApp … Poor kid! Previously he and his brother had navigated the usual blended family's revolving doors ('Make sure you phone Mum on Mother's Day … I'll buy the card for Father's Day …'). They had each other's backs; now, tragically, Rider faced a future navigating the demands of his separated-but-equally-bereaved parents all by himself. His father and I inevitably both want big pieces of him while recognising he needs a new space for himself, free from our neediness; inevitably a tough balancing act for all. In the meantime, however, thank God for WhatsApp. 'What do you think of Australia so far?!' 'Amazing. I love it!' 'Good to hear! Show me the view!' Rider turned his phone around, waving a 'tinny' at a sunset over the gum trees with a twinkling Southern Cross emerging in the early evening sky. I sighed. 'That looks fantastic. Have the best time. Love you loads …' It really was a visceral tug. Yet I knew it was for the best that Rider remained a long way away from home during yet another emotionally bleak winter. Shortly before he died Jackson said that 2023 had been 'the perfect summer'. And now, if only by default in the light of his death, 2023 had become my 'perfect summer' too. Yet, once again, summer — the metaphorical and the real one ahead — seemed very far away, while future 'perfect summers' felt impossibly out of reach. Meantime I battened down the hatches once more. As my partner embarked on three months of chemotherapy I wanted to be there for him. However, (if all went well) afterwards I also wanted to reclaim space for myself. • 35 of the best things to do in Australia As Rider celebrated Aussie Christmas in Queensland — barbecue, swimming, cricket, hitting Surfers Paradise bars and clubs with his eldest cousin, Jordan — I hatched a plan. By the time he'd travelled to Sydney for New Year before arriving in Melbourne, I knew what I needed to do. Though how would my son feel if I crashed his gap year? Have you ever joined your child on their gap year? Let us know in the comments below
BBC News
11 hours ago
- BBC News
Grieving mother from Maidenhead wins book award for memoir
A woman who has grieved the death of a child, lived with cancer and a struggled with IVF has won an award for her Mayling from Maidenhead, Berkshire, titled her book "The Future is Rosie" in honour of her late said she was "super proud of it" after she won the People's Book Prize Beryl Bainbridge Award earlier this 2004, Ms Mayling set up Rosie's Rainbow Fund, a charity supporting very sick and disabled children and their families. Her 11-year-old daughter Rosie died from vasculitis, a rare condition that destroys blood vessels by causing inflammation, on 14 May Mayling said she remembers Rosie "was a completely well child", adding that the family still does not understand how she became her daughter's death, she said the family "were sent back to our normal life but the bottom had fallen out of our world"."There's an awful lot in the book, it's not only about grief, there's an awful lot more," said Ms author explained it covers how she founded the charity, her "five-year journey with IVF", how she has raised her children and lived through breast cancer. 'Joy to be found' Speaking to Radio Berkshire, she said: "I hadn't originally intended for it to be a book, it was just my life, the rollercoaster of my life."It didn't really ever cross my mind that anyone would want to publish my story."She said friends and family encouraged her to write the book and diaries she has kept throughout her life helped her revisit her memories. "It was quite difficult and I just had to face my demons and get on with it," she said, describing finishing the book as "a bit of an epiphany"."I believe that despite anything that you go through, whether you go through the worst possible grief or the worst possible journeys and ups and downs, that actually there is joy to be found at the end of it," she said. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
