Arizona mother Tiffany Roper is warning about the dangers of social media after her preteen son Corey suffered burns all over his body during a “TikTok challenge” gone awry.
“Because of social media, my baby is scarred for life,” the 35-year-old IT worker told The Sun of the freak accident, which occurred in Tucson last August, just days after the youngster’s 12th birthday.
Tiffany realized something had gone horribly wrong after she awoke to a bloodcurdling scream early in the morning.
The petrified parent “jumped out of bed in a panic and raced into his bedroom,” where she discovered, to her horror, that her son “was on fire.”
“His polyester T-shirt had completely melted onto his skin,” said Roper, who quickly sprang to her child’s aid.
“I ended up grabbing my hose faucet from my sink and just spraying him down with water and flooding my kitchen until 9-1-1 got there,” Roper told News 4 Tucson. “My daughter heard it as well, so she woke up and got a towel and soaked in cold water and put it over him to try to help with the burns.”
Doctors later said later that Corey might not be alive today if it weren’t for his family’s actions.
Paramedics arrived shortly thereafter, whereupon Roper discovered the cause of her son’s inadvertent self-immolation.
He had reportedly been filming himself attempting the viral “fireball challenge,” a harebrained stunt where youngsters try and ignite rubbing alcohol to create a makeshift molotov cocktail.
“They told me Corey had held a bottle of rubbing alcohol in one hand and lit it with the other, not realizing how quickly rubbing alcohol burns off,” said Roper. “Corey was in extreme shock but kept saying: ‘I saw it in a video.'”
She added, “I looked up the video on my phone and saw hundreds of them about children who had attempted similar stunts as part of a TikTok challenge, many of which had gone wrong.”
The youngster was subsequently transported to the Banner Diamond Children’s Medical Center, where he was admitted to the ICU and placed into an induced coma with a ventilator to help him breathe.
A subsequent assessment revealed that Corey had sustained second and third-degree burns over 45 to 50 per cent of his body, including his face, neck, chin, ears, back, arms and left leg. During his stay, the patient endured four debridement surgeries — in which surgeons cleaned his wounds — and five skin grafts where doctors transplanted skin from his thigh to the scalded regions.
When he awoke from his coma two weeks later, the youngster had to relearn how to walk.
Corey was discharged from the hospital in September — a full month after being admitted — but still has to undergo weekly physiotherapy sessions and other procedures to help with his mobility and recovery.
“Corey is doing great and is back at school,” said his relieved mother. “He is due to begin laser therapy on his arms this month.”
“I’ve spoken to him about the challenge, but he can’t remember what happened,” added Roper, who says she’s just ultimately grateful that Corey’s “alive.”
She hopes his accident will inspire other parents to warn their kids about the “dangers of challenges like these” and to “report anything online that they think is inappropriate.”
“I’ve always tried so hard to protect my kids from any danger, and I still wonder what I could have done to avoid Corey getting hurt that night,” she said. “Challenges like these are targeted at children because they don’t understand the repercussions.”
Unfortunately, Corey’s not the only youngster injured while playing with fire on camera.
In 2022, a 12-year-old Connecticut boy was severely burned while attempting the “whoosh challenge” — involving people lighting rubbing alcohol in a bottle and the resultant hissing sound — prompting state senator Richard Blumenthal to call on TikTok’s CEO “to act.”
A TikTok representative declared that the pyrotechnic stunt was originally a “school science experiment” that “can be done safely with proper precautions.”
“But videos without visible safety measures will be removed from our platform,” the spokesperson declared. “We also work to add caution labels to videos performed in a controlled setting, though they are ineligible for recommendation into people’s For You feeds.”
