Episode 3 - Smile Now, Cry Later

And so James, he gets to the front door, he puts his key into the lock, he unlocks it, and with a sledgehammer in one hand, he attempts to push the door open. And so James, as he's pressing the door barely open, he's staring into this crack, trying to make out what's going on inside of his house, and then suddenly a set of eyes meet his from behind the door.
And before James can do anything, this man that is standing inside of his house says to James, Hey there, I'm Mr. Bollin.
And what you just experienced is just a taste of what you can expect when you listen to the Mr. Bollin podcast.
In every episode, I peel back the layers of the strange, the dark, and the mysterious. From unexplained phenomena that challenge everything you thought you knew about reality, to true crimes that keep you up at night, I cover it all.
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This episode contains descriptions

of intimate partner violence.

Please listen with care.

My name is Lali Rolon,

but they call me Lali.

So a lot of people,

like they ever hear this,

they'll know me as Lali.

They'll be like, oh yeah, Lali.

She went to school with her, yeah.

The person that Lali went to school with was Daisy. They met in the seventh grade when they had homeroom together.
And for some reason, we ended up sitting in the same table, and we ended up talking, you know? And to me, she was really beautiful. She had beautiful eyes.
Her eyes are what caught my attention. I was like, wow.
And we started getting close. She was so, like, nice, caring.
She would always ask me, like, you know, like, those type of outgoing friends, how are you doing? How are you feeling? And, like, when I would talk to her, it was all, like, smiles. You know, like, laughs and smiles and everything.
And then we ended up getting closer in eighth grade because I had her for PE. Junior high was more than a decade ago for Lolly.
She's in her early 20s now. She's got wavy brown hair parted down the middle.
And on the day that we met, she wore a Whitney Houston t-shirt. She wants to be a nurse someday, delivering babies.
But for the time being, she delivers something else. Food from local restaurants.
That's in between classes at East L.A. College.
I first reached out to Lolly on TikTok. Her profile is filled with funny, candid videos.
Nothing too edited, nothing too trendy. Just snippets of everyday life.
A friend walking around with a paper bag over her head. Soccer teammates banging on plastic bottles to make an ASMR drumbeat.
Lolly and I met up at a coffee shop in Huntington Park. It's a working-class suburb just a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
We sat at an outdoor table on Pacific Boulevard, the main shopping district. It's filled with signs and Spanish advertising, tax lawyers, and passport photos.
There are huge, glittery boutiques that sell tuxedos and princess-like quinceañera dresses. The businesses here cater to a population of mostly immigrants,

like Lolly's family.

They're from Tabasco, Mexico.

And Daisy's family back when they lived here.

They're from Mexico City.

Daisy and Lolly bonded instantly.

They had the kind of closeness where they could spend hours together,

sometimes without even saying a word.

But there were times when Lolly wondered if there was more going on with Daisy than she let on. I feel like she never really told me what was going on deep, deep inside.
Maybe she didn't want people annoying. Maybe she wanted to make it seem like she was always fine, you know, because that's what she seemed like.
It seemed like she was always okay. It seemed like she was always happy.
This idea that Daisy always put on a smile, no matter what, it was something that came up a lot when I spoke to her friends. She could have been going through problems, and she would put yours before hers.
You know, she wouldn't even tell you about hers to help you with yours. So I feel like that shows a lot.
There's not a lot of people that would do that, you know? A lot of people just focus on them. Like, oh, my problems, my problems.
And when you try talking about yours, it's like, oh, no, not right now. Like, I'm talking about mine.
Lolly and Daisy drifted apart in high school. Lolly went to one school, Daisy to another.
But Daisy always stayed on Lolly's mind. But that love that I had for her from elementary, middle school, whatever, it's always there, you know, it's always going going to stay there.
Just because we went our separate ways doesn't mean that I'm ever going to forget about her. Because even though I didn't hear...
Daisy and Lali would end up having a chance encounter in high school. And this encounter, it shed light on Daisy's inner life.
On one of the difficult things that she was struggling with in the years after they lost touch.

It still haunts Lolly today.

When I found out what happened, that's when I was like, damn.

Like, I felt guilty. I felt remorse, and I was like, damn.

Like, I wondered if I could have helped her.

I'm Jen Swan from London Audio, iHeartRadio, and executive producer, Paris Hilton.

This is my friend Daisy.

Episode 3. Smile now, cry later.
Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid.
Long, silent voices from his past came forward. And he was just staring at me.
And they had secrets of their own to share. Gilbert King.
I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Valerie Arellano was two grades above Daisy. She was a sophomore in high school when Daisy was in the eighth grade.
She was still a little kid, still with her little, she hadn't had her hair dyed yet, And I would see her like in the school uniform. She was so sweet and innocent.
It's possible that the two might never have met if Valerie's best friend didn't end up getting pregnant. The father was Daisy's older brother.
I was worried for my friend, you know, having a kid so young, because we were like 15 or 16. And Daisy was, I think, barely 13.
So I did worry about my friend going through something like that so young but I think I felt a little bit calmer seeing that she had Daisy there. She was living with her at the time and I felt like Daisy kind of in a way It became like another sister for her, you know? When the baby was born in the fall of 2015,

Daisy was born in the fall of 2015, Daisy embraced being an aunt. Later, she would even get a tattoo of the baby's name.
Daisy adored the baby's mother, too. She got a septum ring just like her and started dyeing her hair like her, too.
I'm pretty sure she was already interested in that stuff, but I think living with my friend, and because my friend would dye her hair all the time too, she'll have it like so burnt. From like dying it red, having it blonde, dying it blue, green, purple.
I'm laughing because I can relate. My hair was also fried in high school.
Honestly, my brain was probably a little fried too, all the bleach I put on my head, followed by clumps of manic panic and neon shades. And I started seeing Daisy dress up like that too, and she looked so cool.
And I remember she would dye her hair like all these different kinds of colors, and at one point she had it blonde, and she kind of reminded me of like Courtney Love. I don't know if some people take that as offense or compliment.
She'll look really cute though. Valerie's in her mid-20s with short curly bangs and thick hair that when we met she wore in two braids.
I had messaged Valerie on Facebook after noticing that she donated to the GoFundMe that Daisy's mother had started to help with her funeral costs. Valerie's Facebook page is like a community bulletin board.
She often reposts flyers about missing people and lost pets. PSA is about shelter animals that need homes.
And in person, she was just as sensitive and caring as her online profile suggested. A few years back, she told me, she started studying sociology at Cal State LA because she wanted to work in homeless services.
Then she got disillusioned and switched over to art education. She wants to get her teaching credentials someday, to work in a field where she can really have an impact and make a difference.
We sat at a picnic table outside the Civic Center in Huntington Park. That's where Valerie grew up and where she still lives.
And she told me about the first time she met Daisy, about how she watched as Daisy's style and musical tastes began to evolve. I'll see her wear like Nirvana shirts.
I would be wearing the shirts of the Smiths and she would ask me like, oh, where did you buy that shirt? And I would tell her, like, oh, in Pacific, nearby, walking distance. And I started seeing her wear shirts of the Smiths, too.
With her tough exterior, Daisy sometimes gave off the air of someone who was unfazed, self-assured. But underneath it all, she was going through a lot.
It seems like she was probably dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Her parents were getting a divorce after nearly two decades of marriage.
It was finalized in the summer of 2017. And based on what I've heard from Daisy's mother, Susie, it must have been hard on Daisy.
I haven't been able to reach her father. I asked his father, Juan de la O, to help us get in touch.
I never heard back. But from what Susie told me, Daisy used to be very close with her father.
A daddy's girl is how she put it. She was really like this with her dad, she told me, crossing her index and middle fingers together.
But after the split, Susie and Daisy got a lot closer. They ended up moving in with Daisy's grandparents in Compton.

It was a tight squeeze, but it was at least familiar.

They'd all lived there for a time when Daisy and her siblings were younger.

Susie told me that in order to maintain a sense of normalcy,

she decided not to take her kids out of the schools they were already enrolled in.

Now, Daisy had to commute to school from a different city.

Huntington Park was a straight shot on the bus, eight miles north on Long Beach Boulevard until it turned into Pacific The drive took a half hour by car or sometimes an hour on public transit It's hard to imagine this was an easy transition Daisy was living far from her friends her school, her community And now, she had to navigate a new living arrangement with extended family members she didn't always get along with.

But around this time, when Daisy was a sophomore in high school,

she began dating somebody that seemed to bring her comfort,

at least in the beginning.

When she introduced her mother to her boyfriend,

she said that he was 17, just two years older than she was. And at first, Susie had no reason to doubt that.
Victor Sosa looked like your average teenage skateboarder. He carried a skateboard with him wherever he went.
He had thick eyebrows and a thin mustache. He sometimes grew his dark, weighty hair past his shoulders.
But the thing that everybody noticed about him was his earlobes. They'd been stretched and gauged with jewelry.
They looked like big black discs. His appearance didn't bother Susie.
She was actually suspicious of him for another reason. He was too quiet, she told me.
And pretty soon, she began to notice things about him that made her suspect he was a lot older than 17. I saw tattoos on him, she told me.
A lot of tattoos. And I'm like, how old is he for real? Susie would later discover that her daughter had lied to her about her boyfriend's age.
He was already 21 when Daisy was 15. Susie had always felt like she and her daughter run a team.
But after Victor came into the picture, she no longer felt that way. It seemed like everything had changed.
Susie had been working long hours to make ends meet. She was seeing less and less of her daughter.
And when they did hang out, Daisy never wanted to talk about Victor, Susie told me. A number of Daisy's friends told me the same thing, that Victor was a topic that was always off limits.
They didn't know much about him and they weren't even really sure how the two of them met. But they knew better than to ask about it.
When they did, Daisy sometimes told them that he wasn't worth talking about. But Victor clearly didn't feel that way about Daisy.
It was like he wanted the whole world to know about his relationship. Because on Instagram, he filled his grid with photos of her.
Daisy with her hair bleached blonde and then dyed jack-o'-lantern orange. Daisy and fishnets climbing a fence.
Daisy and fishnets on a beach. Daisy in an antique shop.
A little yellow daisy propped in the buttonhole of her jean jacket. His Instagram contained a few photos of himself, too.
There was one photo that showed off his tattoos. On his leg, an image of Jason, the killer from Friday the 13th.
Two blades arranged like crossbones under a hockey mask. Across his abdomen, an outline of the Grim Reaper.
It seemed like he had a thing for horror movies, right down to the clothes he wore. He even sometimes dressed like Freddy Krueger in a red striped sweater and bowler hat.
His look sometimes freaked people out. Like Jose Tevez, the apartment manager at Daisy's building.
He'd sometimes see Victor hanging around the apartment complex with Daisy, and he was not into it. I see all black dress and look like a shadow, look like different than other people.
He dressed in all black, like a shadow, Jose said. Then he compared Victor to The Undertaker, the wrestler who entered the ring in a black leather trench coat and top hat.
Daisy's style had become a little theatrical, too. Her hair was cut short and asymmetrical, and her makeup was dark and bold.
She looked a little like the 1980s punk singer Susie Sue. By her junior year of high school, she had changed her look so much that Lolly, her friend from middle school, had to do a double take when she spotted Daisy on the bus.
I only recognized her because of her eyes. Her appearance was completely different.
Her hair was dyed, her makeup was like,

at that moment to me it was like a little like,

I thought about it crazy in a sense, you know?

But now that I think about it, it's not crazy,

it was just her expressing how she felt, you know?

She and Daisy hadn't seen each other in years,

and Lali wasn't even sure if it was really Daisy she was seeing.

I'm the type of person that, if you look familiar to me, I'll approach you and I'll be like, hey, are you this person? I think I know you.

And that's what I did. I approached her and I was like, Daisy? And then she was like, she looked at me and she turned around and she was like, Lali?

So we're all like, oh, we recognize each other, you know?

Lali and Daisy had a lot to catch up on.

And they only had the length of a bus ride to do it.

Lali didn't want to waste any time. So she went straight to the big questions.
I'm the type of friend that when you catch up, how you been? What are you up to? Are you dating anyone? You know, like, those are the main questions for me to know, like, how are you doing emotionally, physically, and love life? Like, are you with someone? Are you happy? Are you single? Like, yeah. She was just like, oh, yeah, like, I have a boyfriend.
Her name is Victor. He's older than me.
And then she used to be like, oh, sometimes he's just a little possessive. She kind of downed it down a little bit.
But that's why I didn't think much of it. I don't know if her friends knew what was going on with Victor.
I feel like maybe they should have known. To Lolly, it sounded like a lot of high school relationships, including her own, full of drama, insecurity, and intensity.

I didn't think much of it because I was like, okay, we're in high school, we all have problems with our partners.

At that moment, I was a little possessive as well.

Not like crazy possessive, but I do suffer from depression and have ADHD. I I have a little bit of anger issues.
So like, it just takes time to work on, like yourself. So I kind of understood her and I was like, okay, maybe he just is going through a little phase.
Maybe he has to work on it. So I didn't think much of it.
But then during that bus ride, Daisy confided a little more. And then she just told me that she wasn't sure about it because of how he was, you know.

She told me that she didn't like how he was sometimes, that he would get a little violent.

And that she was thinking what she should do and stuff like that.

And then I just told her, like, you ever need advice, you need help, let me know.

Lali was concerned,

but she knew that Daisy had a close circle of friends

at her high school,

a big support system.

What she didn't know

is that she was one of the few people,

maybe even the only one,

who Daisy talked about her relationship with.

Maybe, in hindsight,

it made a strange sort of sense.

Maybe she told me because I didn't know the guy,

you know?

I feel like maybe that's what she told me

because she knew that I wasn't going to go

Thank you. Maybe, in hindsight, it made a strange sort of sense.
Maybe she told me because I didn't know the guy, you know?

I feel like maybe that's what she told me, because she knew that I wasn't going to go and tell other people

or they said I was having problems with her boyfriend,

because I didn't even know the people that she was hanging out with, you know?

But Lali didn't know many of the details,

and the truth of what was really going on.

It was so much worse than she could have imagined.

One night, during the summer before Daisy's senior year of high school, her grandfather,

Juan de la O, was asleep on the couch. Daisy's younger brother began screaming at him to wake up.
Grandpa! Grandpa! This Victor is hitting me at Daisy. What? Juan said that his grandson shouted, Grandpa! Grandpa! It's Victor! He hit Daisy! Daisy's mother, Susie, was in the car on her way home.
She got a call from her youngest son and heard him shouting. He hit her! He hit her with a skateboard.
When Susie got to the apartment complex, she saw blood on the ground, but Daisy was nowhere to be found. She'd taken off running, just like Victor.
To Susie, it seemed like Daisy was embarrassed. Embarrassed that her younger brother had witnessed what had happened.
She was such a mature, rough girl, Susie told me, that for her, that was embarrassing that she was getting hit by this person. Daisy's mother and her grandfather and her little brother began running after Daisy and Victor, chasing them down the street.
Victor eventually got away. When they caught up with Daisy, she was distraught.
The public spectacle of her family chasing her and her boyfriend down the street. It probably added to her embarrassment.
And the last thing she wanted to do was to talk about what had happened. Or even to seek treatment for it.
Susie pleaded with her daughter. She wanted to see the wound on her head.
But Daisy wouldn't show her. She was covering it with a hat.
You need stitches, Susie told her. But Daisy did not want to go to the hospital.
It seemed like she was afraid of reporting the assault, afraid of drawing even more attention to her injury and what that might mean for her relationship. Finally, Susie made a promise.
She told her daughter that she wouldn't call the police. She was bluffing.
She had actually already called the police. Problem was, the police never showed up, she told me.
Daisy finally agreed to let her mother take her to the emergency room. But when they got there, Susie told me, Daisy insisted to the medical staff that nothing had happened.

No assault had taken place. California law requires registered nurses to make a report anytime they suspect a patient has been injured as a result of abuse.
And that's regardless of whether the patient consents to it. So it's unclear why a report was not taken.
But because there was no report made,

this account

of alleged assault isn't based on any sort of official record. It's based on my interviews

with Daisy's mother, her grandfather, and her youngest brother, who confirmed to me that he

witnessed it. Jeffrey, the teenager whose grandmother lived in the building, also witnessed the attack,

according to his mother. After Daisy got stitched up at the hospital, Susie went to the LA County

Thank you. teenager whose grandmother lived in the building, also witnessed the attack, according to his mother.
After Daisy got stitched up at the hospital, Susie went to the L.A. County Sheriff's Station in Compton.
Since the hospital wouldn't file a police report, she figured she'd go to the police herself. But Susie said they told her, quote, the same crap.
They can't make a report if the victim doesn't come forward. Susie was baffled.
Her daughter was a minor. And she'd been injured so badly that she needed stitches.
Wasn't that enough to file a police report? Susie was not willing to take no for an answer. She went to a different law enforcement agency, the Huntington Park Police Department, in the city where Daisy attended high school.
But again, she said, she was turned away. The police department declined to file a report or press charges without the cooperation of the victim.
I asked the Huntington Park Police Department about this. A media spokesperson said they don't comment on incidents involving minors.
But a lieutenant did tell me that this kind of situation, quote, it's not really spelled out in a policy. He described it as a gray area, meaning if a parent comes in to report a crime against their child and the child doesn't want to provide a statement, police might not be able to gather information for a police report.
When Daisy returned in the fall for her senior year of high school, she was called into the principal's office. When she got there, school administrators wanted to ask her about the alleged assault.
She said she didn't know what they were talking about. And that's when, according to Susie, Daisy was told that they had already interviewed her younger brother.
And he said the attack did happen.

Was she calling her brother a liar?

This confrontation, it was all a setup.

It had been masterminded by Susie.

She told me that she had approached school administrators for help in making a record of the alleged assault.

These administrators did not comment on

or corroborate this incident,

citing student confidentiality.

According to Susie, her daughter cracked under the pressure. She told them, no, my brother is not a liar, and yes, what he says did happen.
Victor was banned from entering the campus as a result, Susie told me. And she also banned him from entering her home.
And it was roughly around this time, maybe just a few weeks earlier, that Victor posted this really cryptic image on Instagram. It was this old school tattoo style illustration of this guy holding two different theater masks.
Maybe you've seen this kind of thing. It's like a happy mask in one hand and a sad mask in the other.

And there's this text across it that says,

smile now, cry later.

And then the caption says,

not allowed to see my girlfriend no more.

And then there's this hand clapping emoji and an hourglass emoji.

The whole thing is really ominous.

Like, was it some kind of threat of time running out? It's impossible to know for sure what he meant by this. And it's also impossible to know how exactly this whole experience affected Daisy.
It had to have been incredibly difficult. And it seems like at that point, you know, she was already struggling with this relationship with whether to stay, how to go.

And I just wonder, is this the thing that made her see clearly, gravely, I need to get out?

But getting out of a bad relationship, it takes time. In Daisy's case, it happened about two and a half years after the alleged assault with the skateboard.
It was early 2021. We were driving, Susie told me.
She was like, by the way, I broke up with What's-His-Face. Susie told me that Daisy didn't even like to mention Victor by name because she knew her mother disliked him so much.

Inside, Susie said she was jumping up and down at this news.

But she didn't want to show Daisy how excited she was.

Teenagers are weird, Susie said.

The more you tell them not to do something, the more they want to do it, and vice versa.

So Susie kept driving.

She tried her best to hide her smile and act casual. She kept her hands on the steering wheel.
She looked straight ahead. And besides, it wasn't the first time that Daisy and Victor had broken up.
But something about this time felt different. More real.
Or final. Maybe it was the fact that Daisy seemed like she had so many more options in her life now.

She'd made friends in her college classes,

she'd gotten a job at CVS,

and she had co-workers that she really liked.

There was something else that Daisy did that silently suggested this breakup was the real thing.

She deleted all of her photos of Victor on Instagram. One of Daisy's friends told me that she clocked this immediately.
Daisy never said a word to her about the breakup. She didn't need to.
Her social media said it all. Her and Victor were over.
The oldest remaining post on Daisy's grid, after she deleted everything else, was a selfie.

It was posted on February 3rd, 2021, which was roughly around the time she broke up with Victor.

The photo didn't show her face, but it did show a purple key hanging from a chain around her neck.

A moon and bat tattoo on her clavicle.

A spider web inked across her shoulder.

The caption? On its way to happiness. At the time that she posted this image and caption, it was winter break at East LA College.
But Daisy was not taking a break. She was enrolled in a course called Management for Small Business Entrepreneurship.
In other words, she was on her grind. She wanted to own her own salon one day, and this was one step along the way.
And this class was intense. What was normally four months of instruction was crammed into just five weeks.
Some students in the first few weeks, they'll drop out once they realize, like, oh, I thought it was just going to be an easy, five-week, easier class.

That's Frank Aguirre. He's the chair of East L.A.
College's business administration program. He's got dark, slicked-back hair, and he wore a polo shirt printed with the college's mascot, a husky.
Our business administration degree is one of the most popular degrees on campus. and so we're also one of the biggest community colleges in the state, maybe like the third largest in the country.
Frank didn't get to know Daisy well. This class was only five weeks long, and it was also completely online.
This was still less than a year into the pandemic, so that was the norm. But he did try to get to know all of his students, to understand their reasoning for taking his class.
And one way that he did that was by asking them all to submit a questionnaire, to tell him about their background and interests, to name something unique about themselves. Of course, I wanted to know what Daisy had written in hers.
Well, I can read you what she said here. She has a picture.

She's my Daisy Della O, the reason I'm taking this course is because I would like more knowledge about how small businesses run on my personal entrepreneurship opportunities. My plans are to get a bachelor's or master's in business.
I do plan on transferring to UCLA, Stanford, UC San Diego. In my free time, I enjoy drawing, skating, and reading.
Something unique about me is I am creative. Thank you for sharing that.
I didn't realize she wanted to get a bachelor's and go to Stanford or UCLA or UC San Diego. Do you mind if I ask what her photo looked like? Because I know she changed her hair color all the time.
Can we see? Yeah, of course. Oh, wow.
I hadn't seen that photo. Okay.
So she has kind of the blonde in the front and the black on the sides. Okay.
Thank you. I stared at this photo of this 19 year old woman with so many dreams, so much life ahead of her.
I thought about how the world was just beginning to open itself up to her, to become so much bigger. I thought about how she had recently made this big decision to leave a partner who, by many accounts, had been abusive to her, and how difficult that must have been.
I thought about the injustice of it all.

Just three weeks after this class ended, her life would be taken from her.

And to a lot of people who knew Daisy, it seemed like the cops were willing to let her case go cold.

Not if they could help it.

Next time on My Friend Daisy. It was hard, especially because where it happened, it was like where she was living.
And it's like, what? Like, how can it happen? And nobody saw nothing. Nobody heard anything.
Hi, everyone. This is Paris.
Thanks for listening to my friend, Daisy.

If you or someone you love is experiencing abuse,

you are not alone.

Help is available 24-7.

Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline

for free confidential support.

Call 800-799-7233.

Text START to 88788

or visit thehotline.org. Your safety matters.
Reach out today. My Friend Daisy is a production of London Audio with support from Sony Music Entertainment.
It's reported, written, and executive produced by me, Jen Swan. I'm also your host.

Our executive producers for London Audio are Paris Hilton, Bruce Gersh, Bruce Robertson,

and Joanna Studebaker.

Our executive producer for Sony Music Entertainment

is Jonathan Hirsch.

Our associate producer is Zoe Kolkin.

Production assistance and translations by Miguel Contreras.

Sound design, composing, and mixing by Hans Dale Shi.

Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton.

Our head of production is Sammy Allison.

And our production manager is Tamika Balance-Kolasny.

Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, and Jamie Myers at Sony,

Ben Goldberg and Orly Greenberg at UTA,

and Jen Ortiz at The Cut.