A 23-year-old TikTok influencer was shot dead while livestreaming from her beauty salon in Jalisco, Mexico, officials have confirmed.
A clip showing Valeria Marquez being shot multiple times spread across social media on May 14. It has been confirmed that the video is legitimate.
Marquez was working at the salon Tuesday evening and live streaming to her followers when two men arrived on a motorcycle.
One of the men entered the store, asked if she was Valeria, and delivered a small parcel.
“He’s a little piglet!” Márquez reportedly exclaimed as she unwrapped the stuffed animal in front of her viewers before she was shot. Officials have said that the two men swiftly fled the scene.
The TikTok livestream has since been removed from the platform, but the clip was repackaged and used on other social media networks.
In the stream, Marquez is engaging with 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.
An unidentified woman is spotted in the scene as she apparently shuts down the stream.
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.
According to Rodriquez, the two men came into the salon earlier in the day and claimed they were trying to deliver a gift to Márquez.
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.
