A 17-year-old Mexican teenager died because of a brain embolism allegedly caused by the hickey his older girlfriend left on his neck during a date.
There is a viral video going around Latino TikTok these days about the tragic story of Julio Macías González, a 17-year-old teenager from Iztapalapa, Mexico, who died in 2016 because of a hickey. In the viral video, which has been doing the rounds online for about a week, an AI avatar of young Julio tells the tale of how he died after collapsing during dinner at his parents’ house. On August 25, 2016, while making out with his 24-year-old girlfriend, Julio got a hickey on his neck, but he didn’t think anything of it. After all, young lovers give themselves hickeys all the time, and they’re considered virtually harmless. But what the teen boy didn’t know was that in very rare cases, they can apparently be deadly…
Photo: Janek B./Wikimedia Commons ( Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)
After spending the day together, the two lovers reportedly returned to Julio’s house, for dinner with his family. At one point, the Mexican teen collapsed from his chair and started convulsing for no apparent reason. His parents immediately called the ambulance, but even though paramedics arrived relatively fast, there was nothing they could do to save him.
The subsequent autopsy revealed that Julio Macías González’s death had been caused by the hickey. Also known as a ‘love bite, it is a bruise-like mark caused by sucking on someone’s skin hard and long enough to burst small superficial blood vessels under the skin. in Julio’s case, the suction reportedly also created a blood clot that ended up in the brain, where it clogged one of the fragile blood vessels, causing it to burst.
After Macías González’s death, several newspapers reported that his older girlfriend had disappeared. At the time, his parents said that they held her responsible for his death, revealing that they had never approved of their relationship, because of the age difference between them. It is unclear whether she was ever charged for what seems like a very clear accidental death.
Many of the Latino news sources that picked up the viral TikTok video don’t bother mentioning the original source, and it made us question whether there was any truth behind this story, or if it was just created for shock value. Luckily, digging deep enough in a Google search reveals several articles from 2016 from reputed news outlets, and even though they don’t really offer a lot of information about Julio’s death, at least they show that this is in fact a true story.
Interestingly, this is not the only time a hickey has been tied to a stroke. Back in 2011, English newspaper The Telegraph reported the case of a 44-year-old woman from New Zealand who ended up getting brain surgery after experiencing loss of movement in her left arm because of a hickey on her neck, near a major artery.
