TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A teenage TikTok star’s family is speaking out after her father, a retired police officer, shot and killed her alleged stalker after he showed up at their Naples, Florida home with a gun last summer.
Ava Majury and her family opened up about the terrifying ordeal in an interview with NBC that aired Friday.
The 15-year-old has gained popularity sharing lip sync performances on TikTok, and has more than 1.2 million followers on the social media platform.
Her parents say one of them, Eric Rohan Johnson, 18, became dangerously obsessed with her.
He allegedly sent Ava hundreds of messages on social media. He even paid her classmates for information about the TikToker, according to her family.
Ava’s parents told the New York Times they allowed their daughter to sell Johnson two selfies for $300. Then he started asking her for explicit photos, the family said.
“I had an opportunity to actually text this person and said ‘Hey, she’s a minor and you need to not contact her anymore,’ and we notified the authorities,” her dad, Rob Majury, 51, told NBC.
But Johnson was not deterred. Last summer, he arrived at their doorstep with a gun and shot through the front door, the family said.
“Somebody had attempted to breach the door with, I presume, the shotgun,” Rob Majury recalled.
“All I remember was, I heard it, I felt it in my chest, and I looked up, and there was a hole in my door from the fragments,” Ava said.
Ava’s mother called 911, and her father went to chase Johnson, but he fell and Johnson fled.
The ex-cop said he grabbed his gun and waited for police to arrive. He said Johnson returned with a shotgun and refused to drop it.
“At that point, I took action and neutralized the threat,” Rob Majury said.
After the shooting, authorities told local media a man had been fatally shot during a home invasion. They did not identify him as Johnson and no arrests were made at the time.
“The subject was most likely a stalker that resulted from her daughter’s extensive social media involvement,” the Collier County Sheriff’s Office would later say in a report, according to the Times.
The sheriff’s office sent NBC News a heavily-redacted police report, calling the case an “ongoing investigation.”
After the shooting, the family moved and Ava began homeschooling.
“Everything has changed,” her mother told NBC.
“More security on our end, more reviews with accounts, more checking in. Just trying to be normal for Ava,” her father said.
Despite the terrifying ordeal, Ava is still posting on social media.
“It became such a part of her personality and her being, that to take it away would maybe harm her more,” her father explained.