Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host Ashley Flowers, and I'm Brett, and since May is Mental Health Awareness Month,

I want to tell you a story about a young woman whose deteriorating mental health played a tragic role in her untimely death.

This is the story of my trees Richard's son.

For as long as her family could remember, 24-year-old my trees Richard's son had been absolutely fascinated by the human mind.

She's really smart, really kind, and super curious to learn everything there is to know about what makes people tick.

And so no one in her family is surprised when she decides to get her undergrad degree in child psychology.

They're also incredibly proud because my trees is the first person in her family to go to college.

School, work, family, and a steady relationship with her long-term girlfriend Tessa keep my trees pretty busy in Los Angeles,

which is the same city that she grew up in.

During her undergrad, my trees is living with her great grandma, Mildrid, in a part of Los Angeles called Watts, while she goes to school.

Now, to make some extra money during this time, my trees also works part-time as a go-go dancer at an LGBTQ bar in Long Beach.

She continues this even after undergrad.

She's pretty sure that she wants to go to grad school, so while she looks at programs, she keeps dancing and also starts doing some part-time administrative assistant work.

So from her background, it's pretty easy to tell that she's a hard worker, and her family doesn't know her as someone to get in trouble.

So on the night of September 16, 2009, when Mildrid gets a call from an expensive restaurant down in Malibu, saying that my trees can't pay her $89 bill, she's just totally stunned.

Mildrid tries to pay the bill over the phone with her credit card, hoping that she can basically just clear this up, and my trees can get home, and she can figure out what's going on.

But according to the disappeared episode about this case called Lost in the Dark, the owner at the restaurant won't accept Mildrid's card, because she's not there in person to sign the receipt.

At a loss for what to do, Mildrid calls my trees' mom, Lateece.

Lateece knows that my trees has just been a little bit off lately.

I mean, she's been kind of down, kind of depressed, and Lateece and Tessa, my trees' girlfriend, and even some other people have kind of been noticing that she's just been off.

I mean, you can see it even in her text messages. They've been getting stranger and stranger lately, and Lateece has been worried about her daughter's mental state, but she doesn't have a reason yet to think that it could be any real danger.

And she's never done anything like this before, just leaving a restaurant without paying. This is all new.

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