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Video Transcript

McKenna was, like, larger than life. And when she walked into a room, she lit the room up.

She was the type of personality that people just, you know, she radiated.

People gravitated towards her and wanted to be around her and spend time with her.

She was loving, gregarious, hilarious. very empathetic and compassionate.

Just a very deep, caring person. She was just a beautiful soul inside and out.

She loved being with family and friends. She loved and excelled at, ice hockey.

She was a goalie. You know, as McKenna was entering into her freshman year of high school.

It's, you know, it's not the easiest transitions for most kids, but she was looking forward to her high school career.

So two very tragic incidents took place her freshman year. One that we knew about and then one that we didn't know about

until a couple nights before she passed away. but she had been, like most of her friends.

She talked and communicated online on social media with friends, and she had been talking to a boy that hadn't gone to her school.

He was a hockey player that didn't go to her school. She'd met him out of state at a tournament.

And so they had been talking, they had been communicating for several months.

And, you know, unfortunately, he had talked her into sending a compromising photo of herself to him.

And later on she would share that it was like the biggest regret of her life.

A couple months later, she had broken things off with this boy in order to get back at McKenna.

This boy then sent that photo to McKenna's best friend.

Her best friend turned around and sent the compromising photo of McKenna out to the school. Essentially.

So she was humiliated, embarrassed. And, you know, it it it rocked her world.

Also, unbeknownst to us, while at a teammate's house over a weekend, sleeping over at a friend's house.

Teammate, of hers, she had been sexually assaulted by an older brother.

Her life was kind of unraveling at school, academically and socially a little bit.

But really and truly, she just at home athletically, socially, we didn't really see anything.

There were no warning signs.

But at the end of, you know, just prior to Christmas break, her freshman year, it caught up to her
and she was walking through the gym at her school, and there were a group of seniors that were holding up
their phones and looking at their phone.

she was walking by and they were heckling her and saying things and obviously looking at the picture.

And that was the straw that broke the camel's back for McKenna.

The next two years, she worked hard to get everything back and put the pieces back together.

She was communicating with us friends, happy. She had so much that she was looking forward to plans, future plans.

You know, college hockey, she was, you know, looking forward to her senior year

leading up to the weekend of her taking her life. There was a lot of boy drama and mean girl activity.

The cyberbullying started up again, especially relating to the sexual assault McKenna experienced her freshman year.

They, canceled her over social media, Snapchat, Instagram, that sort of stuff.

She looked down at her phone and her face kind of went white, and I asked her if she was okay and she showed me.

It was snap map, and it showed where all of her friends were. And all of the friends that had been blowing her up were all

at the one friend's house, just a couple of miles away from us. She will have then looked at the social media, saw the social media canceling the all those texts

that she had, or, posts that she had been trying to stay away from.

No one knew better than McKenna how fast and how viral something can go when it's once it's out into the, you know, the interwebs.

I feel like that's when she saw it all. And that's when it just when she got overwhelmed, she couldn't see through it, couldn't see past it.

And, you know, all these memories of what she went through and how hard she had to work to get through what happened her freshman year, all came flooding back.

And having been through it once, McKenna decided she wasn't going to do it a second time. Now, in the days of social media.

And yet it had spread so rapidly, and so the outcome had the outcome had everything to do with social media. Without it, it would have played out very differently.

But that added that it's in your face 24 seven the humiliation and embarrassment that it causes to the isolationism, knowing that people are together, talking about you.

Our journey now is trying to help others, not, you know, parents not go through what we've been through, kids being more educated and more aware of, you know, social media harms, bullying.

You know, words can hurt. Words can kill. Being more mindful about, you know, thinking twice before they hit send the legacy of kindness. And you know, it is the McKenna way.

And helping others and through activism with more awareness regarding social media harms mental health and teen athletes.

I mean, it is we will keep talking until our dying breath. And in keeping McKenna's story out there and helping others through those conversations, she helped so many people here,
and she's helped so many more people since she's been gone.