12-Year-Old US Boy Suffers Horrific Burns After Viral TikTok Challenge: "My Shirt Was On Fire"

A 12-year-old Texas boy suffered severe burns across his body after a TikTok challenge went wrong.  According to the Independent, Caden Ballard and his older brother had seen a video on the app that showed pouring rubbing alcohol into a bottle, igniting it, and creating a flame that shot up the bottle. When Caden tried to replicate the experiment, it resulted in a disastrous outcome, leaving him hospitalised with serious injuries. Caden Ballard told KXAN that he and his brother had attempted to recreate the TikTok video on August 16. After the experiment initially seemed to work, Caden's brother instructed him to get rid of the bottle, but it was still hazardous.

"My brother grabbed and said, 'Here, throw it away.' So, I grabbed it to throw it in the trash can, [and] my shirt was on fire," he said.

Without knowing, the boys had used isopropyl alcohol, which can produce an invisible flame when ignited. This led to Caden suffering second-to-third-degree burns covering 11% of his body. The incident occurred while their mom was in another part of the house. A friend, who overheard the boys calling 911, alerted her to the emergency. 

"He was just face, chest, arms, stomach covered in burns. It looked like his skin had been melted away.  They like to listen to the story times on TikTok, you know, the Reddit stories. So I never expected things to go the way they went," the boy's mother, Christina Ballard, told KXAN. 

Ms Ballard praised her older son's swift response, who quickly removed Caden's shirt and instructed him to stop, drop, and roll to extinguish the flames and reduce the damage. Caden was rushed to a burns unit in Dallas and is scheduled to be transferred to a children's burn unit in Galveston.

According to a GoFundMe page set up for the family, Caden has already undergone surgery and will require weeks of intensive care, recovery, and therapy.

"Caden is a strong and determined young man, but this journey will be long and painful. His parents are faithfully by his side, but the emotional weight is compounded by financial strain — extended hospital stays, time away from work, travel back and forth to Dallas, and bills piling up at home," the page read.

Ms Ballard is now calling on parents to warn their children about the risks of imitating online challenges, citing her own family's close call as a cautionary tale.