A teenager revealed he had committed murder in an Instagram message to his friend when he asked her for help with burying the body.
Joshua Cooper, 16, from Bensalem, Pennsylvania, US, has been charged with the murder of a 13-year-old.
He has been charged as an adult for killing the girl after she was found to have been shot dead.
The police were contacted by Cooper’s friend after she received the Instagram message.
On a phone call to police, she explained that the killer had sent a video message to her over a social media platform.
It was in the video where he allegedly admitted to the murder.
Cooper is reported to have told his friend that he had killed someone, before flipping the camera around to show the body.
In the clip, the girl’s legs and feet were visible and covered in blood.
He asked his friend, also a teenage girl, for help with disposing the body.
Following the phone call, officers went to the trailer park where Cooper lives, where they found the victim dead on the bathroom floor, noting she had a gunshot wound to her chest.
Upon arrival, officers noted that “substantial steps” had been taken to clean up the scene of the crime.
Cooper ran from police, but they managed to catch him and bring him into custody.
He reportedly told police “it was an accident”, claiming during his initial interview that he was cleaning out his father’s safe and removed the firearms that were inside.
According to the probable cause affidavit, Cooper said that he accessed the safe by “replacing the batteries his father had removed, which had made the combination lock inoperable”.
He then spent the afternoon with the victim, watching TV, before he shot her.
One resident of the trailer park told the media: "I heard a gunshot and I know about gunshots. And I come out and open the door and I see the boy run across there.
"I talked to the boy out here on the bench a couple of times and he seemed troubled."
Police reported that they did not identify her due to her being a juvenile, and that she was identified by her jewellery.
They did confirm however, that she was not a resident of Bensalem or related to Cooper.
Cooper was denied bail and sent to the Edison Juvenile Detention Center.
He faces charges of criminal homicide, possessing instruments of crime and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, and has a preliminary hearing set for December 7.
