The mother of the Florida teen killed on a Carnival cruise learned of her cheerleader daughter’s death online because the girl’s pictures and story were plastered “all over Google.”
Heather Wright claimed her estranged ex-husband stayed silent about their 18-year-old’s death and failed to break the news to her directly because of their strained family ties.
“My ex-husband did not try to contact me at all whatsoever to let me know that my daughter died,” Wright told NewsNation Friday, hours after news broke that Anna Kepner was apparently killed by strangulation.
Wright, who lives in Oklahoma, first heard her daughter might be dead from a friend — who told her young son that his “sister was murdered on a cruise ship.”
The mother desperately tried to contact Kepner on her cell phone and even on TikTok, but got nowhere, and turned to the internet.
That’s when she saw reports that the high school senior had been found dead in the cruise cabin she was sharing with her two stepbrothers.
“Then I Googled ’18-year-old died on cruise ship,’ and that’s when my daughter’s face popped up all over Google,” Wright said.
Even law enforcement failed to reach out to her, Wright claimed, alleging they still haven’t contacted her in the weeks since Kepner’s Nov. 7 death.
The woman had a fraught relationship with Kepner’s father, Christopher Kepner, telling NewsNation he even banned her from attending their daughter’s memorial earlier this week.
“He said he knew for a fact Anna would not want me there and I said, ‘That’s a lie, but whatever,’” Wright recalled.
“He said if I step foot in Florida, ‘I will have you arrested immediately for back child support,” she continued, adding she snuck into the service regardless.
“I wore a wig and I wore some really tall high heels so that way if he was looking for somebody short, he wouldn’t see me. Nobody spotted me, I kinda stayed in the back close to the door so if I needed to make a quick getaway, I could.”
Wright admitted she and her daughter did not have a relationship as a result of the rocky history between herself and Kepner’s father, which most recently involved a screaming match and exchange of obscenities between the pair.
“He made it extremely difficult for me to even have a relationship with my daughter,” said Wright, adding that she spoke with the teen only on birthdays and holidays.
The relationship was so strained that Wright did not know anything about the 16-year-old stepbrother being investigated in connection with Kepner’s death, though no suspects have yet been named.
He reportedly had a creepy obsession with Kepner and once allegedly climbed on top of her in bed, according to an ex-boyfriend of the slain 18-year-old — but the two were fighting in the hours before her death.
Kepner’s body was found wrapped in a blanket, covered by life jackets and stashed under a bed.
Anna Kepner died from asphyxiation from a bar hold — an arm across her neck — and had two bruises on the side of her throat, a source close to the investigation told ABC News Friday.
Anna Kepner’s mom found out about daughter’s cruise death on Google
