Teen Pleads Guilty To Child Abuse Homicide For Planning & Videoing Friend’s Suicide

SPANISH FORK, UT — A man who allegedly planned how, when and where a girl should commit suicide and then videotaped her hanging death has pleaded guilty to possessing child porn and child abuse homicide.

On October 23, Tyerell Przybycien, who was originally charged with the more serious crime of murder, accepted a plea deal and will now face anywhere from five years to life in prison when he is sentenced on Dec. 7. The deal also allowed Przybycien, 19, to escape additional charges of failure to report a dead body and witness tampering, reported The Salt Lake Tribune.

In the spring of 2017, 16-year-old Jchandra Brown, a student at Spanish Fork High School, where Przybycien had also attended through that March, confided to him that she was suicidal.

He then reached out to another girl. “What you do if you knew a friend was trying to commit suicide?” he texted her about Brown’s confession. She replied: “Talk them out of [it].”

Instead, Przybycien decided he wanted to do the opposite. “The thing is,” he texted back to the 16-year-old, “I wanna help kill them. It be awesome. Seriously im going to help her. Its like getting away with murder! . . . I’m seriously not joking. It’s going down in about a week or two.”

According to prosecutors, Przybycien began preparations to aid Brown in taking her own life. Finally, on May 5, 2017, he picked her up at her job, and the pair went to buy rope and a can of aerosol duster. They then headed to Maple Lake, just south of Provo. There, Przybycien fashioned a noose, tied it to a tree and Brown climbed onto a pedestal.

“Her putting the noose around her neck, stepping onto the pedestal, and inhaling the compressed air so she passed out and slipped from the pedestal caused her death,” Przybycien’s defense attorney, Gregory Stewart, said in an interview with the Washington Post.

As she died, Przybycien stood by and captured Brown’s suicide on video. According to court documents, he can be heard saying, “Thumbs up if you’re okay,” “Um, are you there? Move or something,” and “That’s when the brain stops getting oxygen.” He signed off the video with: “I guess I’ll just leave this here now.”

The same night Brown completed her suicide, Przybycien texted a friend: “Bro It happened. I helped her do it too and I feel so guilty.”

The following day, a turkey hunter discovered the girl’s body hanging from the tree. Brown left behind a handwritten letter in a spiral notebook with her name and directions to watch the 10-minute video Przybycien shot on her cellphone and left at the scene.

Court documents showed that near the teen's body police also found a receipt for a rope, which was charged to Przybycien’s Visa card.

In a second suicide letter, which Przybycien left in the mailbox of the girl's family home, KSL-TV reported she wrote her mom, “Again, this was my decision.”

Utah County district court Judge James Brady disagreed. “Encouraging and helping to facilitate the suicide of an impressionable minor who could have benefited from support, counseling or therapy is completely lacking of social value,” he wrote in a statement prior to Przybycien accepting the homicide plea deal, which included charges for possessing images of nude girls under 5 that police discovered on his phone during their investigation.

Przybycien admitted he got “carried away” with his involvement in Brown’s death because he was “curious” to see someone die and he was suicidal, too. "I helped," he said. "I feel guilty, I feel like I did murder her."

Brown’s mom, Sue Bryan, believed Przybycien “groomed” her daughter to kill herself. “Friends don’t let friends die,” she said last year. “So Tyerell was not a friend.”

The girl’s aunt, Polly Mejia, echoed the thought, noting, “[Jchandra’s] problem was she thought she'd found a friend and instead she'd found a monster.”

Read more: The Salt Lake Tribune, The Washington Post, KSL