Thirteen-year-old Nicole Lovell was found dead by the side of the road 100 miles from her Blacksburg, VA home on January 30, 2016, three days after she disappeared in the middle of the night. In the months leading up to her death, the teen had been chatting with men on social media, and it has been reported that that is where she may have met the man charged with murdering her, 18-year-old Virginia Tech freshman David Eisenhauer.
Nicole’s father, David, says as soon as he learned about his daughter’s death, he "knew" that social media played a role. He says that around Christmas, he and Nicole’s mother learned that the teen had been frequenting various chat sites.
“We found out that Nicole had been on social media talking to inappropriate people. For a 13-year-old little girl, I thought some of the things that were said were inappropriate from my daughter,” David tells Dr. Phil in an exclusive interview airing Wednesday. “Nicole’s phone was supposed to be taken, disposed of.” But he adds that after a while, the teen got her phone back.
Among her social media activities, Lovell says Nicole was chatting on the popular messaging app Kik, which is reportedly used by as many as 40 percent of American teenagers.
“What did you and her mother see that caused you concern?” Dr. Phil asks David in the video above. “You said some of the things she was saying you didn’t like.”
“Of course not. No father wants to see things like that coming out of their daughter,” he says. “Talking to older guys, which you could tell these older guys had fake profiles. They were pretending to be young guys.”
David tells Dr. Phil that his older daughter snooped around Nicole’s social media pages and took screenshots of the profiles to warn their father about her sister’s concerning behavior.
“What did you see in those messages that made you think of that the minute she went missing?” Dr. Phil asks.
"For my daughter to just run away, that’s not my daughter,” he says.
It has been reported that Eisenhauer, a collegiate athlete, may have engaged in an inappropriate relationship with Nicole and that he and a friend, 19-year-old Natalie Keepers, allegedly had a part in luring her out of her house the night she disappeared. Reports have circulated that Eisenhauer and Keepers allegedly plotted Nicole’s death to prevent her from speaking about an alleged relationship with Eisenhauer. Several reports allege that Eisenhauer killed Nicole and Keepers helped lower her body into the trunk of a car. Reports state that Keepers, a fellow freshman at Virginia Tech, said that being involved in the murder she felt was something “secretive and special.”
This episode of Dr. Phil, “Virginia Tech Students Accused of Murdering 13-Year-Old Girl: The Victim’s Father Speaks Out,” airs Wednesday. Check here to see where you can watch.
Also on HuffPost:
