Caleb Bodkin
My phone pings, I check the home screen to find a notification from LIV: Full_Metal_Jake has a new story.
This can’t be. My brother cannot be posting this. My finger hovers over Jake’s profile picture for a few seconds before I click on it to view his new LIV story. It begins to load and I realize I’m shaking.
There is nothing scary about the story. I’ve seen it before. Jake took this video about two years ago when he was fifteen and the five black hairs on his chin had made their debut, or as he called them, his “beard.” I made fun of him for two weeks until he gave up and shaved it. It was the summer I graduated from Berkeley, and I was staying with my parents until September, when my MBA program was scheduled to start that fall. With a lot of time on my hands, tormenting my little brother was my favorite thing to do.
The mundane nature of the video makes it so eerie to watch now. The story shows Jake sitting in his room wearing his Iron Maiden T-shirt, holding his favorite guitar, the Blue Burst Dean ML 1981. I don’t know much about guitars, or any musical instruments, but Jake would talk my ear off about a topic I wasn’t remotely interested in until I became an expert. Jake is playing the solo from a song by his favorite band. The short video ends there.
I miss him…
He is not away on vacation with his friends like he was planning to do this summer.
Jake’s been dead for three days now.
A tiny part of me is thankful, though, because the story doesn’t show him sitting in our garage where he died. I can’t bear to look in its direction. The garage was Jake’s den. He spent most of his time there, either practicing for an upcoming show with his band, or creating content for his YouTube channel.
Local YouTuber Dies at Family Home Unexpectedly, the local papers wrote.
Was it really unexpected? I mean, what did we really expect when we agreed to watching him do that silly stunt over and over again?!
Still, the sight of this story is disturbing, sad, and sickening.
I take a screenshot and text Emily:
“Did you do this?”
Three minutes later, my phone vibrates with a response:
“I thought it was you, or Andy,” Emily texts back. “Who do you think it is?” She continues nonstop “And wtf! Why’d you think it was me?” She is so quick with her texting.
I understand why she might be offended that I think she’s the person who stole Jake’s account, but honestly, she’s the bigger asshole here because I’m distressed and not thinking straight. I don’t respond.
Emily is Jake’s girlfriend. In my defense, she is my number one suspect because she is the typical attention-hungry teen girl, social-media addict, the human form of everything annoying about Gen Z, and therefore an excellent candidate upon whom to take out all my anger. She is annoying enough, privileged enough, and present enough.
Then again, maybe this identity thief is someone from Jake’s high school, a friend, an acquaintance, or a secret admirer. Especially since LIV is mostly popular among teens and college kids.
I go next door to Jake’s room to check his phone; I punch in his birthday and go to LIV; he’s signed out of his account.
Weird … but I’ll worry about that some other time.
Who else is sick or stupid enough to hack into a dead guy’s LIV account? Someone who thinks invading Jake’s privacy after he ceased to exist is a good idea, a cute, fun tribute, or a comforting act.
It’s none of the above!
“Thanks for posting this tribute. He was so talented,” one of Jake’s classmates messages me.
That’s it! I am not going to sit back and let everyone think I am this irresponsible, irrational, and inconsiderate asshole.
As I walk back to my room, I press on the three dots in the right corner and choose “Report.”
“Why are you reporting this post?” LIV asks. A list of options follows the question, none of which includes, “Someone is stealing my dead brother’s identity,” so I choose “False information.”
However, reporting this content is not nearly enough. This intruder must be denied any digital identity. So, I decide to follow it up with a “Request to Remove Account of Deceased User” and a complaint email to the LIV customer service team in which I ask them to stop the activity on Jake’s account, investigate the matter further, and take the necessary steps to prevent any similar future actions by inconsiderate jerks.
The heartbreak of admitting that my little brother is no longer an active member of the online community and will remain inactive forever makes my chest feel too tight and leaves me fighting for breath. In this moment, I realize that the reality of my loss is starting to seep through my daily routine. It’s hard to admit it to myself, and then to put it in writing is like admitting my defeat in this battle against my own grief.
How am I supposed to carry my tone? Emotional? Matter-of-fact? Like he is just another lost account; it’s business as usual?
Life doesn’t go on the way we think it will after we lose someone we love and care about deeply. We take a detour, thinking that one day we are going to end up back on the main road. But the truth is that we unlock a new area on the map, and things never go back to the way they were.
I hit “send” on my phone, and then I lie awake on my old bed, thinking about the reality of the situation, tears blurring my vision. This simple process of reporting the story magnified my anguish. I can hardly breathe. This much stress is not good for someone in my condition, and it just occurred to me that I haven’t taken my supplements today. I have to do it because my parents don’t have the strength to deal with my fragility at the moment.
I can already guess what the response from the LIV customer service team is gonna sound like. “We are sorry for your loss … we apologize for the inconvenience and for failing to protect your dead brother’s privacy … we will take the necessary action…” Probably some investigation into who did it and whose failure it was.
Nothing that will make me feel better.
Because nothing is going to bring Jake back.
More sympathy, pity, regret … all immediate triggers for my sorrow.
I need a break to mourn my loss and a break from mourning. So, I drift into restless sleep.
The Hills Inquirer
Local YouTuber Dies at Family Home Unexpectedly
By EVA MARTIN Jul 14, 2024
Red Hills resident and guitarist from the metal band Unreleased, Jacob Bodkin, died on July 13; the cause is believed to be a stunt gone wrong. He was seventeen.
The authorities in King County responded to a call by Jessica Bartlett, the Bodkins’ neighbor, who found Jacob unresponsive in the family home’s garage.
“I walked to the Bodkins’ house to complain about the noise. I could hear the music louder than usual. Just like before the Bodkins rebuilt their soundproof garage,” Mrs. Bartlett told the Hills Inquirer.
“I kept knocking with no answer. I couldn’t ignore the noise because I had the ladies from my book club over, and the noise was very distracting.” Jessica continued.
The door to the garage was unlocked, so after knocking for several minutes with no answer, Jessica said that she had to go in to speak to Jacob. To her shock, she found him on the floor, in a pool of blood, with his head and shoulders under a stack of Marshall amplifiers and speakers, weighing more than 150 pounds altogether.
Lt. Walter Crouse of the King County Sheriff’s Office confirmed on Saturday that the body was with the medical examiner to determine an exact cause of death.
Jacob was the host of the YouTube Channel “The Dean.” The name comes from “the Dean from Hell,” Dimebag Darrell’s guitar; Dimebag is the guitarist from the iconic metal band Pantera. Jacob used this channel to talk about guitar playing techniques and sounds, upgrades and fixes, covers of his favorite songs, and to promote songs by his band Unreleased.
A distinctive feature of Jacob’s channel was his closing stunt, inspired by a live performance by Eddie Van Halen in 1982. The act required Jacob to run up a stack of fake amplifiers designed to look like a towering wall and then kick it to gain momentum for a somersault while carrying his guitar. The southern wall of the Bodkins' garage was covered with fake amps, with only three real amplifiers placed at the far-left end of the stack. The real amplifiers were used to create “the Brown Sound,” the warm and powerful guitar sound he talked about frequently in his videos.
The initial investigation analysis suggests that when Bodkin was performing the stunt for the last time, he accidentally kicked the real stack of amps, which landed on him, killing him.
In a heartfelt post, the Bodkin family shared the devastating news on social media. "It is with great sadness that we inform everyone that Jake Bodkin passed away yesterday," read a statement on the band’s LIV page.
