Darren Lewis/Public Domain Picutes

Murder Mystery: Smartphone App Leads Seattle Teens to Dead Body

11:00 June 26, 2020
By: John Glover

A group of teens found a suitcase stuffed with human remains on a Washington state beach earlier this week, reports Inside Edition. The minors stumbled on their macabre discovery while following the directions of the recently popular app, Randonautica, a software that leads its users to random geographic destinations.

If you've ever read or seen the popular film adaptation of Stephen King's Stand By Me, this story closely resembles that one. It's not so much stranger than fiction as an equal amount of strange. A group of brooding teens goes on a coming-of-age adventure to unearth a dead body only to discover something about themselves.

Because these kids belong to Generation Z, they were, naturally, livestreaming themselves the entire time on TikTok, the globally trendy online platform for sharing miscellaneous short video content.

In their livestream, the teens can be seen exhibiting excitement upon finding the suitcase on the beach. That's before they caught a whiff of the stink emanating from its gruesome contents.

They then called the police, who confirmed the biology of the remains as human. Officers also discovered remains floating in the water inside of an additional bag. The police are still working to confirm the identity of the deceased.

The app the teens were using, Randonautica, apparently gained popularity during the coronavirus quarantine. A service whose sole claim to fame is providing a random set of coordinates to its user might seem like one of those inscrutable youth fads that mystify older people as a matter of course—akin to Pokémon Go or TikTok itself.

Despite this unexpected dark chapter, Randonautica's particular moment in the sun seems wholesome in a way. It gained a following as a way for people to alleviate the tedium of life at home, a means for people to spend time together during a time of overwhelming solitude.

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