Jennifer Sellers thought she knew her daughter.

Sydney Dane Sellers, 14, was the total package. The Pell City High School freshman excelled in the classroom and beyond. She was beautiful, with long chestnut hair and porcelain skin. She wrote poetry, earned her black belt in Taekwondo, took honors classes and was an altar server at her Catholic church.

She might listen to Ella Fitzgerald one day, and Breaking Benjamin the next. She hunted, and fished, and had just started playing around with a guitar. She had been dating a boy in her grade who, Sellers said, hit every check on the list of traits a parent would want in their daughter's first boyfriend.

Sydney was, her mom said with admiration, a free spirt and non-conformist, much like Sellers herself had been all through high school and college.

But Sydney had secrets. Things had been happening in her young life that her parents knew nothing about, and learned only after they found her hanging from a belt that was looped around her loft bed.

"I didn't know my child. I knew the part of her that she wanted me to know," said Sellers, a children's rights attorney. "But as a parent, it never occurred to me there might be more. My child was a great person, but my child was being assaulted, and from more than one direction, by really evil people."

Sunday, Dec. 7, 2014 was Sydney's first day as an altar server at Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church, and her last day alive.

She had spent Saturday with her boyfriend and his family celebrating his birthday, which was actually on Sunday. Sellers' mom said the hours leading up to Sydney's death were wonderful, and extraordinarily ordinary - church, lunch, a trip to the doctor because Sellers had a brutal headache, and then an afternoon of laughing, joking and watching TV. "We were so proud of her,'' Sellers said. "That day was so wonderful."

Later that afternoon, Ronnie Sellers, Sydney's father and Sellers' husband, went to take a nap. Sellers busied herself in the kitchen, preparing Sydney's favorite dinner - turkey breast, Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes and asparagus. "She came trotting out of her room, and she was bouncing around laughing and having a great time,'' Sellers said. "She headed to the kitchen, and I was like, 'What are you doing?' She said she wanted some pizza rolls and I was like 'No, no, I'm fixing your favorite supper,' so she bounced back into her room."

"I said, 'I love you baby. I'll come get you in about 20 minutes when supper's ready,' and she said OK and shut the door,'' Sellers said.

There was no way Sellers could prepare for what came next. "When dinner was ready, I went to get her. I found her hanging from her bed,'' she said. "Knowing my child the way I do, my first reaction was, 'Sydney, that's not funny.' Then I looked at her. Her skin was marbled and I ran over to where she was hanging."

"I tried to lift her. I couldn't get her up high enough to undo the belt,'' she said. "I started screaming for my husband, who was asleep. He was able to lift her. We got the belt undone and we laid her on the floor. He immediately started CPR - he's retired Army, plus he's a captain in the Department of Corrections. He later told me that he knew when he saw her that it wasn't going to work, but he had to try."

While Ronnie Sellers tried to revive his only daughter, the frantic mother called 911. Rescue workers arrived on the scene within three minutes. "They wouldn't let me back in the room, but the EMS people told me she was gone,'' Sellers said. "They tried, I don't know what, but it included electrodes because they were still on the floor after they left. She was just gone."

The St. Clair County coroner came to the scene, as did a family friend from church who also was a paramedic. The coroner declared Sydney dead on her bedroom floor, but Sellers refused to allow her body to leave their home until a priest had administered the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites. The family's priest was out of town, so it took several calls and quite a while before a priest from a neighboring town got to the home.

"My husband and I, we were in complete shock,'' Sellers said. "It was like a bomb had gone off in our world. Our ears were ringing, and we couldn't see real well, and we couldn't talk. We just really didn't know what was going on except that our daughter was on the floor in her bedroom dead, and it didn't make any sense."

Six months later, it still doesn't make sense. "But,'' Sellers said, "I have more information now than I did that night."

The coroner ruled Sydney's death a suicide. "We didn't have an autopsy done because the cause of death was pretty darn clear,'' Sellers said. "I didn't want her to have to go through that and I didn't believe they would find any other information."

Sellers did ask for toxicology screening, though she said she had no reason to believe they would find any drugs in her system. "I was a little curious. She was 14. My mother didn't know everything I did when I was 14,'' she said. "Her boyfriend is straight as an arrow, but just as a parent I wanted to know. There's a lot of stuff I'll never know."

As they prepared to bury Sydney, Sellers got the first of several blows that would come her way.

Those preparing Sydney's body for an open casket told her mother to make sure she brought a dress that would at least come to Sydney's knees. When Sellers asked why, she was told that Sydney had multiple scars on her lower abdomen and upper thighs. "She had been cutting, for at least six months before she died," she said. "From what I've been told by several of the kids, it's a lot more prevalent than parents and educators think."

Within days, Sellers said, she got a flood of Facebook friend requests from Sydney's classmates. "I'd say the majority of the ninth grade class friended me within 48 hours of her death. And I started getting private messages,'' she said. "Apparently my daughter was being bullied at school, pretty severely from what I've been told by a couple of kids. We had no idea. The school never called and said your daughter is being bullied and we're doing something about it."

Sellers was told that Sydney had been screamed at, called names, pushed and shoved, and it appears most of it stemmed from jealousy over Sydney's boyfriend. Sellers had no idea. "I do remember a conversation with Sydney and she said, 'You know, it's hard having a boyfriend.' I asked her if she wanted to break up with him, and she said, 'No, just some people make it really, really hard,''' Sellers said. "That's all she ever said and that she was trying to figure out a way to deal with it. She was a strong girl, which is contradictory to her death. She had a strong personality, and nobody changed her."

Principal Tony Dowdy said school officials didn't hear of the bullying until after Sydney's death. "We did hear that from our students, on the backside, and we started asking questions,'' he said. "We didn't get a clear picture. Was that part of it? Possibly, probably but we got conflicting reports."

He said Sydney was a talented girl who was well-liked by her classmates. "We were devastated over the loss,'' Dowdy said. "We were all just shocked."

Sydney had several close girlfriends, and they were among the first to reach out to Sellers. But others did as well. "I can count on one hand the number of nights I have not been up until 2 a.m. listening to kids from that school private messaging me about the bullying, the problems they're having with other students, cutting, their personal issues,'' she said. "I tell them, 'I would encourage you to talk to your parents about this, but I will be here for you.'"

Sellers said she can relate. "I remember high school. It sucked. It was horrible,'' she said. "I was the fat kid in high school and I was the band geek. Guess who got bullied? I know what it means to be bullied. What I tell them is that somehow I managed to get out of high school, and go to Auburn and I was the black sheep at Auburn too. I marched to my own drum. I had my only little circle of friends. I was into heavy metal and I had black lights."

"I saw a lot of that in Sydney too,'' she said. "I keep telling kids, 'High school is four years. Just get through it. Walk down the hall like you mean something. Because college is a fabulous place - you can be whoever you want to be.'''

About a month after Sydney died, Sellers asked investigators to return her daughter's cell phone so she could retrieve some of her pictures. "It was an iPhone and I didn't want her to have it, but it was a gift,'' she said. "I had little to no control over what she was doing on it."

They had previously debated about Facebook, and Sellers had shut it down but then she let Sydney have a page on the condition that Sellers could be her "friend" and therefore monitor her activity. "We never had had secrets,'' Sellers said. "She asked me the most bizarre questions. I never couched anything because I'm not stupid. If she's asking me the question, she's already heard the answer from somebody. My dad's a surgeon and my mom's a nurse and we got the facts, Jack, when we grew up."

"She never had a problem talking to us about stuff, except what was going on at school. That was the first instance where somebody was coming to her aggressively and negatively and persistently and I think she wanted to try to fix the problem on her own,'' Sellers said. "Which I commend her for because if she told me she had been bullied at school, I would have pulled my mom jeans on and gone up to the school and demanded something be done about it which would have humiliated her horribly, so I'm sure there more than one reason why she didn't come to us with that."

Sellers charged Sydney's phone, and powered it up. Once juiced, it wasn't Sydney's homepage that popped up, but the controversial Kik messenger, a phone app that police say is one of the more dangerous because of the anonymity it allows. It is, they say, a playground for child predators.

"It is a horribly dangerous place for kids to be,'' Sellers said.

The phone opened up to a text conversation that apparently was ongoing when Sydney died. It was about erotic asphyxiation, or breath control play, which is the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for the purposes of sexual arousal.

"I looked further at her phone, at her Kik and I found 2 other people that had been making contact with her, one of them at 2:30 a.m. and very super sexual,'' Sellers said. "I've been married for 17 years and I don't have conversations like this with my husband. She was 14. She was playing a long with a little bit of it, but when they got serious, like send me a picture, she refused. "

Sellers and her sister began to investigate. "We were able to identity three distinct individuals, one of whom had multiple pages under different names,'' she said.

Sydney had blocked at least one of them - The Last Rat - Sellers said, but he had returned under several different names. She also had received multiple messages, supposedly from other Kik users, telling her that The Last Rat missed her and to please unlock him.

They found one message, sent to Sydney the day after she died that read, "I'm so sorry you did that. That's not what I meant to happen. I love you."

"Whatever she, and these people, were doing online, it literally had no effect on her daily life,'' Sellers said. "It didn't affect her school performance, it didn't alter her relationship with her boyfriend, and it didn't affect her relationship with us. It was just a big secret that she did in the middle of the night."

"And I don't know why, other than it was fun and she was 14 and hormonal," she said. "But I don't think she understood these were grown men and they were grooming her. They were moving into the 'I really want to meet you phase.'''

The bullying, the cutting, the clandestine online chats - all of it was a shock to Sydney's parents. "None of it came through in her life, her attitude. It has hit us like a freight train,'' Sellers said. "We're both still sitting around like how did this happen? Her daddy is in law enforcement and her mama's a children's rights attorney. We never held anything back from her."

"If I had known then what I know now, one, she wouldn't have had a smart phone,'' Seller said. "She would have had a phone that could make a call, get a call, send a text, get a text. And all of her internet activity would have been in the living room."

Much of December and January is a blur for the Sellers. "Neither of us was able to work at all in January. I literally didn't leave my recliner, and stared at a spot on the wall,'' Sellers said. "Somebody from church would drop off a meal, at least once a day. I didn't sleep for a month, and lost 30 pounds in two months. I'm still not sleeping. You cannot imagine the things your brain does when you're asleep after you've seen your child hung to death."

Sellers finally went back to work in late January, but then came down with pneumonia. Soon after she learned the source of her frequent headaches - which had sent her to the ER on the day Sydney died - and then had to undergo cervical fusion.

She's now been back at work full steam since the last week in March. "There have been some changes in the way I feel about my job, I've got to tell you,'' she said. "Having a child and doing the kind of work I do gives you a perspective that I think is necessary. Losing a child, and doing the work I do, still gives you perspective but it also becomes a little problematic."

"Because now when I'm representing a parent I have to be careful - I look at the stupid things they're doing like heroin or meth, and I think 'Oh my God, what I wouldn't do to get my child back if it meant dragging my whole body naked across shattered glass, I would do it in a heartbeat," she said. "I have had to walk away from several conversations, but the law is the law and I'm an officer of the court and my arguments must follow the law, but it hurts me to the core to see parents throw away, literally throw away, their children because of a lifestyle choice."

The Sellers had been looking to move before Sydney died, and since have made that move. They ended up buying the house Sydney had wanted. "In the other house, there were days I couldn't leave it because she was there. And there were days when I did leave that I couldn't come back, because she was there,'' Sellers said. "There was literally nowhere in the house to go where you couldn't see the door to her room. I couldn't stay there anymore."

Sellers is well aware of the divorce statistic among parents who have lost a child, but said she and her husband have vowed not to become one of those statistics. "We actually said to each other, within a couple of days, that there was no way in hell we are going to let this break us up,'' she said. "We have a deep, abiding love and respect for each other that we had before Sydney came around. That doesn't go away."

Just recently, they got dressed up for a Japanese ballet and had their first "date" together in 15 years. "It was hard,'' she said. "Not because we didn't know how to act around each other in public, but because it was so obvious that it was just us now."

Sydney's death was ruled a suicide. Youth suicide is a serious problem, and is among the top three causes of death in her age group every year. There is also the possibility that it was an accident - a result of the erotic asphyxiation text discussion she was having. Sellers said a toxicology panel wasn't done, despite her request.

Sellers will never really know. "Either way, she is gone, and in a really bad way,'' she said.

What does Sellers think led to Sydney's death? "My child was literally being attacked from two different huge parts of her life. School is like a third of a kid's life. What they do on social media is another third. The rest they are sleeping and eating. Literally two-thirds of her life was coming at her in a bad way,'' she said. "She was dealing with bad things, negative things, trying to deal with herself, trying to be strong and I think it just overwhelmed her. And I think by the time it got to that point, she felt like it was too late to come to us. Because how in the world was she going to explain to us how it got to that point?"

"I think she got to the point of no return. She couldn't fix what was going on at school, she couldn't handle it anymore,'' she said. "Then when she got home, it was whole different set of problems. At night she was dealing with perv central. She was an altar server that day. So she's sitting on a Catholic altar serving at mass and then going home the same day and having this person coming to her with conversation and information that is so contrary to that. How could she not feel guilty?"

Sellers is sharing her horrific experience because she wants schools, parents and other kids to be warned, and beware. "There were parts of my child I knew nothing about. It's hard as hell for me to say some of this stuff, to admit there were parts of my child I knew nothing about,'' she said. "Every parent likes to think they know exactly what their child is up to 24 hours a day. Did you tell your mom and dad everything you were doing? Things are so much more dangerous today. It's sinister."

"The internet allows for the worst of us free access to the most innocent and gullible of us,'' she said. "I didn't know. I thought Facebook was our biggest problem."

Bullying at school, and on the internet, needs to continue to be addressed, she said. So do the anonymous apps that link predators with their prey. "They conduct their activities on the internet because if they did the same crap in real life, they'd be in the penitentiary. These sites are meant to connect total strangers, and the only people on these sites who are going to be honest about who they are your 12, 13 and 14 year old kids who are posting their selfies."

She hopes to take her message to school groups, church groups, anyone that will have her. Her message is simple: Know your kids.

"Go out of your way to know your kids. If you're a parent, I don't care how angry your kids gets with you, I don't care how private they think their lives should be, if they're under your roof, there's a limit to their privacy,'' she said. "If you're paying for that phone, there's a limit to their privacy, if they are not 18, there's a limit to their privacy. If you're supporting them in any way, there's a limit to their privacy."

She said such conversations aren't comfortable. In fact, they're anything but comfortable. "Me, or anybody else who seeks to get through to kids or parents, has no choice but to talk about things that are really uncomfortable and will make some folks squirm,'' she said. "But I guarantee you, in every school, in every church, in every Sunday school class, there are people there who are actively doing things that are bad for them."

"They're self-harming, and there's a whole lot ways to do that besides cutting. There may be drug issues or alcohol issues that are easy to hide for a very long time. There may be internet activity, like with my child,'' she said. "I found out way too late to do anything about it. That could have saved my child."