Astrology influencer stabbed partner to death and threw her children from moving car over solar eclipse fears

An astrology influencer who killed her partner and one of her children before taken her own life was allegedly driven to act by fears she had about the solar eclipse.

Danielle Johnson, aged 34, stabbed her partner to death and then pushed her two children from a moving car before killing herself by driving her vehicle into a tree. Her youngest child, aged eight-months- died at the scene, but her nine-year-old child managed to survive. Johnson carried out her acts of death and destruction in Los Angeles on Monday (April 8), the same day that a rare phenomenon of a total solar eclipse plunged parts of the United States into darkness. In the days leading up to her crimes, Johnson took to social media to voice her beliefs that the solar eclipse would be the “epitome of spiritual warfare”.

Posting under the name “Ayoka”, the astrology influencer had over 100,000 followers in her X account, @MysticxLipstick, and often posted about conspiracy theories. In her last post, on Friday April 5, she told her followers to “wake up; the apocalypse is here” and warned them that they needed to “pick a side”.

It was in the early hours of Monday morning, hours before the eclipse, that local police said she carried out her crimes. The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement titled “family dispute turns into double-murder suicide”, that, at around 3.40am on Monday morning, Johnson got into a verbal fight with her partner Jaelen Chaney, age 29, at their home. Johnson is said to have became violent and stabbed Chaney to death.

She then allegedly took her two young children, aged nine and eight-months-old, both said to be girls, away from the scene in a dark-coloured Porsche SUV. According to local news publication ABC7 the children may have witnessed their mother kill Chaney. The Porsche was seen driving down a nearby road, the 405 Freeway near Howard Hughes Parkway. At around 4.30am, the two children were then thrown out of the vehicle while it was moving.

The nine-year-old survived but sustained moderate injuries from the fall. LAPD Lt. Guy Golan told Fox11 that the eight-month-old was hit by oncoming traffic in the middle of the road and died on the scene. “As the 9-year-old fell into the middle of the freeway, she injured herself and dropped the infant,” Mr Golan said. “And then, in a race to get out of the freeway and not get hit by traffic, the nine-year-old managed to get to the shoulder successfully, but the infant was struck by traffic. And so the infant succumbed to her injuries in the middle of the freeway there.”

After this, Johnson then carried on driving, accelerating the vehicle to a speed in excess of 100 miles per hour, before crashing into a tree in the city of Redondo Beach, a coastal city in Los Angeles County, at around 5am. She died from her injuries.

It wasn’t until around 7.35am that Chaney’s body was found at the couple’s home when neighbours noticed that the front door was open, and the full horror of what Johnson had done became apparent. Police said a neighbour went in to check on the family after seeing the door was open and found Chaney dead.

A neighbour told ABC7 that she discovered the scene of the killing when she spotted a trail of blood leading to Johnson’s home. “Their door was wide open, there was blood on the floor leading into their apartment, and then a trail of it in the hallway leading up to the elevator, and I saw some blood on the walls,” the unidentified neighbour said.

Her father, who called the police, added: “Called the police and told them that something was not right. And they told me, when I spoke to the EMT, to go in and check on the body. So I did. And he was deceased, he was facedown on the floor. And there was a lot of blood."

Police have not yet spoken about what motivated Johnson to act in the way she did. Golan told The Associated Press that while investigators have reviewed her social media posts, they are not considering the eclipse to be a contributing factor “because we just don’t know why she did what she did”.

He added: “We’ve taken all the facts we can, but without being able to interview her and without having something more tangible than a post on X, I don’t know how much weight you can give to somebody (saying) there’s an apocalypse and attribute it to one of the most horrific murders we’ve had in LA.”

LAPD investigators said that Chaney and Johnson had been dating for around three years and were living together, with Golan stating that there had been no prior incidence of domestic violence ever reported between the couple, CBS reported. She was said to have still been married to a previous partner and was going through a divorce. It is not known if Chaney was the father of the baby who died. Family members say he was a United States Air Force veteran.

Investigators say that the child who survived the tragic sequence of events has been able to speak with them to tell them what she had witnessed. She is currently under the care of the Department of Children and Family Services.