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TikTok Stars You Might Not Know Passed Away

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Four young TikTok creators built devoted followings before their lives ended far too soon.

TikTok crossed one billion users worldwide in 2021, and with that growth came a new class of overnight celebrity — teenagers and twenty-somethings turning dance clips, comedy bits, and lip-syncs into millions of followers almost overnight. That speed cuts both ways. Several of the platform’s rising names died suddenly in the months before this piece published, through car crashes, freak accidents, gun violence, and suicide, leaving fanbases that had watched them daily searching for answers.

• Gabriel Salazar (@gabenotbabe), 19, died in a high-speed crash near Crystal City, Texas, in September 2021 following a police pursuit; three other passengers also died.
• Anthony Barajas (@itsanthonymichael), 19, was shot inside a Corona, California movie theater during a July 2021 screening of “The Forever Purge” and died days later.
• Rochelle Hager (@rochelle.hager), 17, was killed in Farmington, Maine, in March 2021 when a windstorm knocked a pine branch onto her car while she was driving.

A Police Chase Ends in Tragedy

Gabriel Salazar had built a following on TikTok under the handle @gabenotbabe before his death at 19 in a high-speed crash near Crystal City, Texas, in September 2021. The wreck came at the end of a police pursuit and killed three other passengers in the vehicle along with Salazar. The crash cut short a following that had grown around his personality-driven content, and it left his fans grappling with how quickly a car chase had turned fatal for four young people at once.

Shot in a Corona Movie Theater

Anthony Barajas, who posted under @itsanthonymichael, was 19 when he was shot inside a movie theater in Corona, California, during a July 2021 screening of “The Forever Purge.” He died days later from his injuries. Barajas had drawn a substantial TikTok audience through his videos before the shooting, and his death turned an ordinary night at the movies into a story that circulated widely across the platform’s community of young creators mourning one of their own.

A Windstorm and a Phone Call

Rochelle Hager was 17 and posting as @rochelle.hager when she was killed in Farmington, Maine, in March 2021. A severe windstorm brought down a pine tree branch onto her moving vehicle while she was behind the wheel and on the phone with her fiancée. The randomness of the accident — a storm, a branch, a car on an ordinary drive — made her death especially hard for followers who had watched her share everyday moments online just like millions of other teenage users of the app.

Dee’s Struggle Behind a Million Followers

Dazharia Shaniece Noyes, known to her more than one million followers as “Dee” (@dazhariaa), died by suicide in February 2021 at age 18. Her death sparked wide discussion among fans and family about the pressures, harassment, and mental health toll that come with sudden internet notoriety, especially for teenagers still figuring out who they are offline. It’s a conversation that echoes through coverage of other online personalities and public figures who’ve struggled under similar scrutiny.

An 18-year-old with over a million followers, gone by suicide — and a fanbase left asking what the fame had actually cost her.

Noyes’s case, in particular, reignited scrutiny of how TikTok and its rivals handle young creators who go viral before they’re equipped to handle the attention, harassment, and constant visibility that comes with it — a dynamic that has played out across social platforms well beyond TikTok, as seen in coverage of other public figures whose online lives ended in tragedy.

Common Factors Behind Recent Losses

Salazar, Barajas, Hager, and Noyes didn’t die of the same cause, and their content ranged from comedy to lifestyle to personality-driven clips with no single unifying theme. What connects them is age — all were teenagers or barely out of their teens — and the platform that made them recognizable before most people would have otherwise known their names. Their deaths sit alongside a broader pattern of young influencers whose sudden fame outpaced any real support system, a pattern explored in the chilling connection between celebs who died young and echoed in stories like the final tweets from Regina King’s late son, which similarly raised questions about mental health struggles playing out in public.

None of the four saw their following peak before their deaths — Noyes had already cleared a million followers, and Salazar and Barajas were still climbing when the news broke. That’s the part TikTok’s community keeps coming back to: these weren’t fading stars, they were still on the way up.