Penelope Sokolowski was just 16 years old when she took her own life last February.
Her father, Jason, believes her suicide was the culmination of a grooming process that began on Roblox, the game platform beloved by kids — with some 170,000 users under the age of 13, according to company data from 2023.
“We kind of thought we were covering all the bases,” Jason told The Post, noting that his family had used a third-party app to monitor Penelope’s online activity.
Jason alleges that his only child was contacted by a predator on Roblox who coerced her into cutting his name into her chest and sending videos of herself bloodied from self-harm — and who, ultimately, sent Penelope down a spiral that culminated in her death.
The girl was 7 or 8 years old when she first signed up for Roblox, players rove around online worlds and can chat with other users.
“I’d come in and sit in the room with her and see what she was doing, ask who those people were,” Jason said, recalling Penelope drawing an anime-style sketch for a friend she’d made on Roblox.
“As a dad I thought, oh, this is nice, she’s artistic, and she’s made artistic friends,” he added. “But I didn’t understand what Roblox was and its effect on her.”
The dad, who works in the film industry in Vancouver, British Columbia, separated from Penelope’s mother and moved out of the family home when the girl was 13.
He recalls how Penelope’s grades began to tumble and, when she was 14, he noticed scars from self-inflicted cuts on her arms, which she had been covering with bracelets and his oversized hockey jerseys.
Penelope confided that she had been recruited into a self-harm group via Roblox, but assured her father she had moved on.
But not long after her 16th birthday, she took her own life.
Later, when Jason opened up his daughter’s cell phone, he found what he describes as a “crime scene.”
According to the dad, there were messages spanning two years with a person who egged on her self-destruction. Jason believes Penelope met this person on Roblox and then began privately conversing with them over Discord — sometimes for hours.
In one exchange, Penelope sent a photo of her chest, offering to cut herself there but worrying she couldn’t go “too deep.” Minutes later, she followed up with an image of the predator’s Discord user name written across her chest in bloodied letters.
In other images, she had carved the numbers “764” into her body. Jason believes Penelope had been contacted by a member of 764, described by the FBI as a “violent online group” that targets minors and grooms them into committing egregious acts of self-harm and violence.
Members of 764 reportedly troll platforms like Roblox looking for victims they can persuade — via grooming or sextortion — into hurting themselves.
“They are grooming girls to do whatever it is they can get a girl to do, whether it’s nudes or cuts or gore or violence,” Jason said. “[Penelope] was brainwashed all the way through.”
Hellbound and Down 