The mother of a 15-year-old boy who killed himself is suing Roblox and Discord for wrongful death, alleging the apps’ lack of guardrails allowed her son to be sexually coerced by an adult predator into sending explicit photos.
Ethan Dallas – an autistic teen known as the class clown and the star pitcher on a baseball team for kids with disabilities – made a new friend on Roblox after a player who said he was a child named Nate started messaging him, according to a suit filed last week in the Superior Court of San Francisco County.
The pair would play Roblox – a world-building video game – together every day and talk late into the night. Nate eventually showed Ethan how to disable some of the parental controls his parents had set up.
That’s when the conversations turned sexual and moved to the messaging app Discord, where Nate demanded Ethan send explicit photos of himself – threatening to share their messages otherwise, according to the lawsuit.
Ethan started having anger fits, which grew so intense that in December 2022, his mother, Becca Dallas, and her husband placed Ethan in a residential treatment center for a year, according to the New York Times.
“I’m sorry. I feel so bad about myself. I feel like I’m worthless,” Ethan wrote Becca in a text message in December 2023, according to the report.
“Promise you won’t get mad if I tell you?” the 15-year-old wrote.
Becca took Ethan to a Denny’s near their home in San Diego, where he told her about his messages with Nate on Roblox – his favorite video game that he had been playing since he was about seven years old.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Becca told the New York Times. She said that she thought Roblox “was a children’s game.”
After returning to school, Ethan seemed normal – catching up with schoolwork and talking about buying his dad’s car and painting it purple once he got his driver’s license.
One night, Ethan woke Becca up with a knock on her bedroom door. “He just came and laid his head on my lap, and kept saying, ‘I love you,’” Becca told the New York Times. “And I said, ‘I love you, too.’”
The following morning, her husband found Ethan lifeless in his room – just four months after he had confided in his mother about Nate.
A year later, in April 2025, Florida law enforcement told Becca that “Nate” was likely Timothy O’Connor, a 37-year-old man who was arrested on separate charges of possessing child pornography and transmitting harmful material to minors. In December 2023, O’Connor was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, according to public records.
Roblox has about 40 million players under age 13 – or more than a third of its user base, making it a clear target for predators.
While the platform is aimed at young children, it also caters to adult users, who can use the private chat and voice conversation features to speak with child players.
In July, Roblox launched a face-scanning feature to help verify users’ ages. But this can be circumvented by playing on another person’s account, according to safety experts.
“We are deeply saddened by this tragic loss,” a Roblox spokesperson told The Post. “While we cannot comment on claims raised in litigation, we always strive to hold ourselves to the highest safety standards.”
“At Roblox, safety is a top priority and we are continually innovating new safety features – over 100 this year alone – that protect our users and empower parents and caregivers with greater control and visibility.”
A Discord spokesperson told The Post: “We use a combination of advanced technology and trained safety teams to proactively find and remove content that violates our policies. We maintain strong systems to prevent the spread of sexual exploitation and grooming on our platform.”
They added that Discord requires all users to be at least 13 to use the platform.
In April, Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, launched a child-safety investigation into the company, and Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, sued Roblox last month – calling it “the perfect place for pedophiles.”
More than 20 lawsuits accusing Roblox of enabling sexual exploitation have been filed in federal courts so far this year, according to the New York Times.
About a dozen law firms are working together on child-safety lawsuits against Roblox, hoping to create a legal precedent that could hold Roblox and social media companies responsible for allowing predators on their platforms, said Alexandra Walsh, a partner at Anapol Weiss.
Becca, who is also suing Discord, is seeking unspecified financial compensation for emotional distress.
“I want his story shared,” said Becca, who started a foundation in his name this month for children with mental health issues.
“To scare parents to know that I thought my kid was safe, and that it wasn’t going to happen to me.”
Ethan started playing Roblox in 2015. His parents switched on parental controls that limited how much time he could spend in the game, and allowed them to approve friend requests.
But those controls didn’t prevent adults from messaging Ethan, according to the report.
Becca said she thought Roblox had been monitoring his conversations, since he had been temporarily banned a few times for using phrases like “stupid ass.”
“I never heard about anything inappropriate going on, or I would’ve busted through the door,” she told the New York Times.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
