My son killed himself after falling for an online scam. I heard it happen – and vowed to protect other children

What were the last words Brandon Guffey said to his son Gavin? Four years on, he still struggles with this question. “That last exchange, it bothers me constantly,” he says. “I think I said, ‘Goodnight, buddy. I love you,’ and he said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’ I sincerely hope that’s what I said. The truth is, I’ll never know for certain.”

The exchange happened in 2022, on a hot July in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where, just weeks before, Guffey had won the Republican ticket to stand for the state’s House of Representatives. The election was three months away, Guffey’s head was buzzing with politics, and he’d spent that evening at a local event.

The house was still when he returned home just before midnight. His wife, Melissa, had gone to bed; his two younger sons, Callahan, 4, and Coen, 16, and both family dogs were sleeping too. The only sounds were the summer cicadas and the frogs calling from the nearby creek – and also the laughter of his 17-year-old-son, Gavin. He was gaming in his bedroom, headset on, talking with friends. It was the long summer break between school and starting college. “I often say Gavin was living his best life at that point,” says Guffey. “He’d just got comfortable in who he was. He wasn’t trying to ‘fit in’ or please anyone. He was looking forward to starting college and pursuing his dream of becoming an art teacher.”

A call came in on Guffey’s phone. He wishes he’d never taken it. The idea that Gavin might have needed his dad when he was unavailable, talking politics on the porch outside, is almost too much to bear – but in the hour that followed, Gavin’s life hurtled towards darkness.

A friend request came in on Gavin’s Instagram from BellaJanet28. They shared friends – their exchange shows that Gavin thought she was a volleyball player from a local college. Guffey still hasn’t been able to bring himself to read the conversation that took place between them, but he knows that BellaJanet28 suggested a game of truth or dare, which led to Gavin sending intimate photos, and then a sextortion attempt. BellaJanet28 demanded money, otherwise the images would be shared with all Gavin’s contacts.

At about 1.30am, Guffey saw Gavin on the landing, where they had that last exchange. Moments later, a terrifying sound, a crash, like a bowling ball, boomed from the bathroom, where Guffey found his son lying on the floor. The smell of gunpowder, the blood soaking into his socks, Melissa’s screams, still haunt and horrify him. “I’ll never stop replaying it,” he says. “They’re etched into me for ever.”

Guffey is a South Carolina state representative now, and a leading advocate for child online safety. In his own state he has seen through new levels of safeguarding. Just a year after Gavin’s death, through Guffey’s campaigning, “Gavin’s Law” was passed in South Carolina, making sextortion a felony and education about it mandatory in all schools. Last year, Guffey won more sweeping reforms that will require social media companies to activate safety features when users in South Carolina are under 16, including parental permission for the account, and prohibitions on direct marketing, the “infinite scroll”, and automatic video playback, which are all associated with prolonged screen time. He has founded a non-profit, Less Than 3, which campaigns on these issues, and supports affected families; he regularly shares Gavin’s story in schools, churches and community centres.

Now Guffey has written a book about it. Tomorrow Needs You is a hard, harrowing read – and brutally honest. In all sorts of ways, Guffey has blamed himself. Did his career play a part? Most of Guffey’s working life had been spent in business, building up a landscaping supply yard, which he still ran, but in 2020, he had joined the county council and was now moving towards a seat in the statehouse.

“It’s a big seat. This was a big race that got a lot of coverage,” he says, “and Gavin had already gone viral in the middle of it.” On a night out, Gavin had spotted the Lamborghini belonging to the basketball player LaMelo Ball, mooned beside it and posted the image on Twitter/X. “I gave him a speech about the Guffey name, and not to mess it up,” says Guffey. (Gavin duly posted an apology – “Sorry Melo, I won’t show my ass like that again” – with two thumbs-up emojis.) “Gavin had seen friends lose college scholarships for something stupid they said on Twitter,” says Guffey. “To him, everything stays online. These images were never going to go away.”

Even putting his political career aside, Guffey felt he had failed as a father, as a role model. “Sitting there that night, I was already asking myself, ‘Why couldn’t he come to me? Was he so worried about being vulnerable?’” says Guffey. “It took a tragedy for me to really start diving deep into myself and saying, ‘I’ve been doing this wrong my whole life.’”

Guffey himself was brought up by a teenage mum, who was tough – she worked three jobs and carried a brick in her handbag – and taught her son to be tough too. “She was scared I didn’t have a male influence, and she pushed me towards that masculine side where ‘boys don’t cry’, you suck it up whatever happens,” he says. “My entire family, this community, that’s the mindset. Man up. Rub some dirt on it.”

And then, there was the gun that Gavin had used to act on that terrible, split-second decision. It belonged to Guffey, who had taken it on a recent camping trip for protection, then left it on a high shelf, intending to lock it away. “I didn’t know that the majority of suicides are impulsive,” says Guffey. He has since been told that the median length of time between making the decision to take your life and the act itself is only 20 minutes, but when there’s a gun involved, it can be less than three. (Hence the name of his non-profit.) He has got rid of his guns now. “I’d been so focused on protecting my family from outside threats, I didn’t realise the dangers that can come from within the home,” he says. “The tool I had to protect my son ended up being the tool he used to take his life.”

At first, the weight of grief and failure felt too much to carry. Guffey says he couldn’t go 15 minutes without feeling he was breaking down. At times, he drank too much – to the stage of passing out on the path outside his home. It was his son Coen taking him aside and saying how hard it was to see his dad like this that served as a wake-up call. “I was trying to numb myself,” he says. “I haven’t cut out drinking but I don’t keep alcohol in my house now. I’ve learned that whatever emotion I feel when I start drinking is just amplified.”

That talk with Coen marked a broader turning point. “The only way I could function was to think that two boys were watching to see how I coped, and I was teaching them whether I wanted to or not,” he says. “Dads are great at giving advice. We’re just horrible at following it. So what I’ve tried to do since then is think, ‘What advice would I give to Coen?’, and then try to do that.”

The immediate support from his community helped. From the night it happened, their house, he says, became like a “small city”, filled with people who brought food, took the rubbish out, cared for four-year-old Callahan. “People I was polar opposite of politically just came out to be there,” he says. “Nothing makes you realise how silly half the stuff we fight about is until you experience loss like that.”

Meeting Gavin’s friends was another comfort. Just 48 hours after his death, Guffey invited everyone who had known Gavin to a local community space to share their memories. “I knew Gavin as a son,” he says. “I wanted their perspective, a full picture of who he was.” He discovered that when Gavin used to leave the house at 4am – Guffey had always thought he was going to the gym before school – he’d really been picking up friends who’d stayed out too late and were trying to get home. And the reason so many of Gavin’s clothes seemed to get lost – and Guffey’s too, including his hat which had gone missing – was that Gavin had given them away to friends. “I wanted all the stories, no matter how mad or bad,” he says, “and they brought a lot of joy.”

Gavin’s phone had quickly provided police with a clear picture of the exchange that had led to his suicide. Guffey’s first impulse was to pull out of the election and throw himself into the pursuit of “BellaJanet28”. Although Meta had closed that Instagram account after a subpoena, someone with the same profile picture and friends list, using the name BellaJanet30, was now contacting Gavin’s family members. It isn’t believed that Gavin had been targeted because of Guffey’s career – it was probably a random approach – but the sextortionist had followed events since and was now demanding money from Melissa, Coen, Gavin’s 14-year-old cousin and Guffey himself, in exchange for the images. One message featured a headline story involving Hunter Biden, superimposed with a picture of Gavin. The implication was clear.

Two days before what would have been Gavin’s 18th birthday, a little less than a month since his death, Guffey received a message from BellaJanet30 that said, “Did I tell you your son begged for his life?”, with a laughing face emoji. Guffey messaged back, “I will find you. I will end you. You will regret this.”

Amid all of this, the prospect of “politics”, of fighting an election and serving the community seemed impossible. “The last thing I wanted to do was handle other people’s problems. I didn’t feel qualified any more,” he says. Guffey told Melissa that he was standing down but her response was unequivocal. “She said,” recalls Guffey, “‘Absolutely not. You’re one of the few people who can actually make a change. Go down there and save the next Gavin.’”

In some ways, this mission has saved Guffey, too, and kept him moving forward. Where once, Guffey knew nothing about sextortion – one of the fastest-growing online crimes against children – there are now few who know more.

Guffey is a passionate advocate for the repeal of section 230 in the US which gives platforms legal immunity from the content they carry because it is user-generated. “I would love to see no social media for any minor,” he says, “but if the tech companies could be held civilly liable for what they are delivering to children, they would prioritise safety over profits.”

The investigation into BellaJanet28 by the FBI and South Carolina law enforcement required new levels of patience, says Guffey. “It was like holding my breath underwater.” The breakthrough came through bank verification numbers that enabled agents to trace financial transactions linked to the account.

In January 2025, the suspect believed to be responsible for Gavin’s sextortion, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal, was extradited from Nigeria. Guffey and Melissa attended his first court appearance in Columbia, South Carolina, where he pleaded not guilty to charges including child exploitation resulting in death, cyberstalking and coercion. “I waited for him to come out, so full of rage and anger and anxiety that I cracked a rear molar,” says Guffey. “As soon as he appeared, my wife just broke down and then it became about protecting her, not anger towards him. He wouldn’t look at us.” The pretrial is scheduled for December.

In the short time since Gavin’s death, there has been some progress, Guffey believes. “For the first couple of years, I was only getting calls from teens who were going through it, and I’d try to convince them to go to their parents,” he says. “Now I’m getting calls from the parents, whose teens have told them and they’re coming to me for help.” But nothing he does ever feels like enough. “If you were to ask me what I’ve accomplished, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, because it’s go, go, go,” he says. “That is my grieving. Everyone does it differently and this feels like what I should be doing. I have to use that anger sometimes, just to get up, get going and through the days.”

Gavin has stayed with him every moment, he says, in a crowd, in an audience when Guffey gives a speech, and at home when he walks through the door. He sees grief as a kind of “weather system … you’re always under it”, Guffey says. “And you carry an umbrella at all times.”

Though people often tell Guffey how “strong” he is, that’s not how he feels. “Strength implies choice,” he says. “What I’ve done has been survival. When Gavin died, I made a vow that his death would not be meaningless. My mission until the day I die will be to try and make sure no other teenager feels as trapped, ashamed and hopeless as he did that night.”