A popular 23-year-old TikTok influencer was fatally shot while livestreaming at her beauty salon in Jalisco, Mexico, officials reported.
Valeria Márquez was working Tuesday evening at the salon and livestreaming to her followers when two men rode up outside on a motorbike, according to CNN
One of the men entered the shop, asked if she was Valeria, and delivered a small parcel, CNN reported.
“He’s a little piglet!” Márquez reportedly exclaimed as she unwrapped the stuffed animal in front of her viewers before she was shot, and the men fled on the motorbike.
The killing was captured on her TikTok video before it was taken offline, according to several media reports.
It shows Márquez talking to her followers and cooing to the pink stuffed pig before turning her face away, apparently to her killer. She then clutches her chest and slumps over, according to media reports.
An unidentified woman is spotted in the scene before she apparently shuts down the stream.
By the time paramedics arrived it was too late for Márquez.
When police arrived she was “still sitting in the chair where she was surprised with that doll, the little pig, right there in her arms,” Denis Rodriquez, a spokesman for the Jalisco State Prosecutor’s Office, told The New York Times.
The prosecutor’s office described Márquez as a “person with an active presence and influence on social media.” She had some 200,000 followers.
Investigators had no suspects as of Wednesday, but were poring over surveillance tapes.
The two men came into the salon earlier in the day, and claimed they were trying to deliver a gift to Márquez, according to Rodriquez.
They “most likely didn’t personally know her, as they had to ask for her by name,” Rodríguez told The Times.
“They didn’t have a personal relationship,” he said. “He was simply her executioner.”
The prosecutor’s office was investigating the killing as a possible gender-based “femicide.” Mexico has one of the highest rates in the world of femicide, despite new laws to protect women.
A 2023 study found that femicide has been rising in Mexico for nearly a decade with some 11 women murdered each day. More than 50,000 women were murdered from 2001 to 2024, with less than 5 percent of the cases ending in conviction, the United Nations reported.
On Sunday mayoral candidate Yesenia Lara Gutiérrez was gunned down along with three other people during a campaign march in the state of Veracruz. That attack was also captured on livestream, on Facebook, CNN reported.
