The child died on the asphalt of Interstate 75.
Twelve days after 13-year-old Mason Towler, who had autism, slipped away from his Atlanta home and was fatally struck by a pickup truck near Cleveland Avenue on January 29, 2026, his parents found themselves trapped in a cruel financial netherworld. Salena Holmes and DeMarko Towler needed to bury their son. Instead, unauthorized solicitations and a phantom fundraising website hijacked the boy's tragedy, publicizing $16,000 in bogus donations while his mother faced the prospect of surrendering his remains to Fulton County for indigent cremation.
Not a single dollar reached the family.
Trouble surfaced shortly after the accident when a family acquaintance put Holmes in touch with Renee Sunshine Lewis, a local bereavement advocate. Lewis asked for pictures and drafted an agreement seeking authorization to organize a GoFundMe campaign and solicit press coverage.
Holmes refused the offer outright.
Text records confirm Holmes withheld authorization, yet Lewis launched two separate GoFundMe pages under Mason's name regardless. Platform officials moved swiftly once alerted, terminating both pages for violating anti-fraud and deceptive solicitation standards. GoFundMe confirmed that the drives had pulled in $175 from unsuspecting donors, which the platform refunded entirely to original contributors rather than releasing to organizers.
Official corporate records show that Lewis operated without valid regulatory credentials—her company, Gracy & Mercy Concierge Bereavement Services, was dissolved by state authorities in 2017. Lewis disconnected phone inquiries and failed to answer written messages regarding the unauthorized drives.
| Case Metric | Official Record Details |
|---|---|
| Victim | Mason Towler, 13 years old (Atlanta, Georgia) |
| Date of Fatal Collision | January 29, 2026 |
| Unauthorized GoFundMe Collection | $175 (fully refunded to donors by platform) |
| Mother's Authorized Campaign | $700 raised |
| Phantom GoFundRaiser.org Balance | $16,000 displayed across two unauthorized clone pages |
| Mortuary Provider | Stocks Funeral Home Kirkwood Chapel |
Scrambling to gather the money required for a private burial, Holmes initiated her own legitimate campaign, which collected approximately $700. Then an even more brazen digital syndicate struck.
Photographs and personal narratives from both Holmes' campaign and Lewis' cancelled pages surfaced on GoFundRaiser.org, an unaffiliated offshore portal notorious among consumer protection monitors for unauthorized content cloning. The site posted two campaigns bearing Mason's likeness, displaying an aggregate donation ledger of $16,000.
The money was a ghost. No funds transferred to the Towler household, and the platform maintained no customer support channels to explain where the proceeds had gone. Following inquiries and mounting consumer complaints detailing systemic unauthorized image-scraping, operators abruptly restricted public access to GoFundRaiser.org.
He will be able to leave in the right way.
DeMarko Towler, Father of Mason Towler
Floral tributes remained unpacked while Mason's body lay in cold storage at Stocks Funeral Home Kirkwood Chapel for nearly a full month. His working-class parents sat paralyzed between predatory web operators and the rigid bills of the funeral trade.
Kyle Stocks broke the logjam. Stocks, who took over the historic Kirkwood mortuary operation the previous year, intervened after learning that the boy remained unburied while digital platforms flaunted fictitious thousands.
Hearing of the family's ordeal, Stocks erased the mortuary bill entirely. He covered the funeral services, official obituary, and cremation out of his own operating budget. Stocks' intervention allowed the family to hold formal services without incurring county intervention, closing a month-long exploitation ordeal as consumer watchdogs examine copycat fundraising portals targeting grieving households.