A TikTok star and her mother tragically passed away from a car crash on June 19 in Houston.
While many Black Americans were celebrating the Juneteenth holiday on Monday, Tiffany Cofield was finding two of her family members had been victims in a car crash on a Houston street. She is the sister of popular TikToker Britney Joy Murphy and the daughter of Sherie Smith. Both women were headed to a Juneteenth celebration.
According to 11Alive News, Murphy collided with a pickup truck on West Tidwell Rd. near T.C. Jester Park. The 35-year-old lost control of her Honda Civic and crashed into a tree. Cofield drove by the crash and immediately knew it was her sister.
“It looked like her car and everybody, when I was walking up, said a mom and daughter died and I knew they had left and knew the only mom and daughter would be my mom and sister,” Cofield said to ABC 13.
Cofield started a GoFundMe page to help with funeral costs. She wrote that the driver of the pickup was being “reckless,” but didn’t provide any further details on how the driver was being reckless behind the wheel. She also wrote that her mother and sister’s bodies will be shipped to California.
“There will never be a time when I won’t miss my mother and my sister. They were my best friends. They were everything,” Cofield said through tears to ABC 13.
Houston police said that the pickup truck that Murphy collided also hit another vehicle before flipping truck and landing on its roof. The 18-year-old driver survived and was taken to a hospital for minor injuries. The driver of the third vehicle was not harmed. No one has been cited or charged but the investigation is ongoing. Police already ruled out intoxication being a factor in the accident.
Murphy became popular on TikTok when she started making funny content about the everyday struggles of working a 9-5 job. Some of her videos included the first thing she does when she gets home from a long day of work, how she gets ready in the morning, and other things people can relate to working in corporate America.
She had a little over 491,000 followers on TikTok and had four of her 9-5 videos reach at least 5 million views. She posted her last video on the morning of June 19 and it was titled “When you forgot you don’t work because its Juneteenth.”
Cofield said her sister went from 4,000 followers to over 400,000 followers in just four months.
“I was so proud of her,” Cofield said to ABC 13.
Her content even made her grandmother join TikTok.
“She brought joy, so much laughter,” Marsha Gregory, Murphy’s grandmother, said to KHOU reporters. “She made me start being on TikTok.”
Murphy and Smith were also planning to meet Mecca, another TikTok influencer, at the Juneteenth event. She described Murphy’s content as very relatable.
“Unfortunately, most people don’t like their 9 to 5. Just the way she carried it in terms of ‘uhh it’s such a drag, I gotta go to work,'” Mecca told KHOU. “She was very relatable and humourous, you know, everybody loves to laugh.”
Murphy’s GoFundMe page was within hundreds of dollars of its goal of $100,000 as of early Thursday afternoon.
