Caleb Bratayley's Death Is Not A Mystery - The Guardian

Caleb Logan Bratayley – real name Caleb LeBlanc – was the eldest child of the Bratayley family, based in Maryland: a dad, mum, and three kids vlogging (video blogging) since 2011.

The family is a sort of online middle-class version of the Kardashians, and has modelled its success on another YouTube family, the Shaytards.

The Bratayleys’s eponymous YouTube channel, which has more than 1.7 million subscribers, consists of mostly quotidian, middle-American life: baseball games, baking, trampolining. Video titles include: “Just Hangin’ Around the House” and “Sick on a Plane”.

The kids are cookie-cutter cute and father, Billy, is a military man. Their most watched video has racked up almost 23 million views and their fan base spreads across multiple platforms: Vine, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Age-wise, it’s mostly made up, as one might imagine, of kids the same ages as Annie, Caleb and their other sibling, 7-year-old, Hayley.

On Friday 2 October, two days after Hayley’s birthday was shared via Facebook (“#stillcelebrating”), an Instagram post which has since garnered 236,000 likes announced Caleb’s sudden and tragic death.

The post said Caleb had passed away from natural causes the previous evening. “This has come as a shock to all of us. Words cannot describe how much we will miss him,” it read, alongside a picture of the youngster and his sister.

A day later, on 3 October, the final video in which Caleb appears was uploaded to YouTube, apparently filmed just a day before his death. It has garnered over 4 m views.

In the video, which is perhaps slightly more banal than usual – sleepy kids eating breakfast before school – Caleb answers a question a fan has asked about what he would ask his future self. After pausing for ten seconds, he jokes: “Is Taco Bell still around?”

The well-known sports fan then adds that he wonders whether more sports would be invented. Caleb’s last words are “see you guys tomorrow”, before a still image displays a message beginning: “unfortunately, Caleb passed away the day after we made this video”.

View image in fullscreen

Caleb’s death comes at a tragically young age and many fans reacted by expressing their sympathies for the family and shared their own grief at his passing. But while younger acolytes focused on heartfelt tribute vines and emoji-laden comments, some observers began to question how a kid could die “overnight”.

Online, people began to talk of the “suspicious” official reason given by the police of a “sudden medical condition”. Many of them not Bratayleys fans, but armchair eyebrow raisers – attracted to what that saw as a mystery to be solved.

Under pressure from an internet cacophony and “numerous inquiries both nationally and locally”, and after Gawker ran a piece on LeBlanc’s “mysterious” death, the Anne Arundel police department released a statement clarifying that no criminal investigation was taking place into the youngster’s death as there were no “suspicious factors or suspected foul play”.

View image in fullscreen

Indeed, to most, the suddenness of Caleb’s death would appear to give more credence to this official reason, rather than less. It’s difficult to raise objections to a cause of death that is a sudden medical condition by arguing that it happened so quickly. But the questions kept coming.

Understandably, Bratayley’s mother, Katie, who mostly only participates in the family videos as a narrator, asked for privacy and respect during the “grieving process”.

When she announced on social media that her son’s memorial service would be live-streamed on Periscope and Facebook, as well as announcing a 21 minute tribute video to Caleb after his death, that was seized on as a contradiction with requesting privacy.

Since Caleb’s memorial, his parents have appeared on the ABC show Good Morning America, again to further explain his cause of death. They mentioned heart problems that had run in the family, and that Caleb likely died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. This is not such a rare condition – in the UK, 1 in 500 people have it, and it frequently goes undetected.

As far as I could tell, the memorial service that was live-streamed did not include tributes from the immediate Bratayley family, seemingly as to keep them private. Bratayley is not the real family name; LeBlanc is. (The Guardian is reporting it as such here as is usual when reporting a death).

For a family grieving the sudden death of a child, the attention of people online seeking to uncover the facts of the case must just add to the distress. For the fans who have been used to such extensive access to the family’s lives, to not have that extended to them around a death may seem incongruous.

Wannabe sleuths have always existed. Sometimes deaths that transfix popular imagination are genuinely suspicious – remember the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey in 1996?

But broadband internet has made it easier for people to position themselves as detectives. And the rise of online stars has made their followers feel more entitled to know everything about people’s lives. Mining social media leads people to believe they are in full possession of the facts, rather than odd holiday photographs and statuses posted in anger.

When this has happened on a large scale, it has often gone horribly wrong. The Reddit manhunt for the Boston marathon bomber ended up fingering the wrong guy. False information was spread across Twitter after the Marysville Pilchuck high school shooting. The Jessica Chambers online truthers turned on the murdered girl’s own mother. When it comes to a life lived online, death, apparently, does not quite do us part.

Unfortunately, the hunt to truly “explain” Caleb LeBlanc’s death is just another example of people attempting to crowdsource “justice”, even in the face of a quite obviously non-suspicious, tragic death.