February 14th, 2024, 9 in the morning, Dubai time.

Joelyn Velasco points her phone at her own face, tilts it to the angle she’s practiced a thousand times, and smiles.

Not a real smile, the smile.

The one she built from scratch when she was 22 years old, filming makeup tutorials on a cracked iPhone in a two- room house near Clark Air Base.

The smile that turned half a million strangers into followers.

The smile that turned followers into sponsors.

The smile that turned sponsors into a plane ticket out of Angeles City, Pampanga, and into a penthouse 92 floors above downtown Dubai.

Happy Valentine’s Day, loves, she says to the camera.

Her voice is bright, musical, the kind of voice that makes people feel like she’s talking only to them.

Spending the day with my forever.

She pans to a bouquet of red roses on the kitchen counter.

She shows a glimpse of a Cardier box.

She blows a kiss.

The video goes live at 9:00 a.m.

Within an hour, it has 200,000 views.

The comments flood in the way they always do.

Sana all living the dream 8.Filipina excellence goals taga.

Heart emojis, fire emojis.2.

3 million followers who believe they are watching a woman who escaped.

14 hours and 47 minutes later, Javelin Joy Velasco is dead on her bathroom floor with a bullet in her head.

The video is still getting likes.

Her body isn’t cold yet, and strangers are typing heart emojis on a dead woman’s performance.

They don’t know she’s gone.

They won’t know for days.

And when they do find out, the man who killed her will be the one who tells them, posting a statement on her own account, using her own platform, controlling the last thing she’ll ever say to the people who thought they knew her.

But they didn’t know her.

Nobody did.

Not the followers, not the sponsors, not even her own sister.

Not entirely.

Because the woman behind that smile had been planning something for months, something desperate, something that was supposed to set her free.

She paid 2 million pesos to have her husband killed.

3 days later, she was the one who ended up dead.

If you’re watching this, you’re not here for entertainment.

You’re here because something about this story caught you.

The smile that was too perfect, [music] the life that looked too good, the ending that came too fast.

You’re here because you can tell when something’s wrong.

And something was very, very wrong behind every frame Joy ever filmed.

[music] Subscribe.

This is where people like us gather.

People who look past the surface.

People who want to know what actually happened.

[music] Now, let me take you back to understand how Joy ended up dead on Valentine’s Day holding a gun she’d never touched in her life.

We need to go back 3 years.

[music] Back to the moment a 24 yearear-old woman walked into the Dubai Gold Souk with a plan she thought was bulletproof.

She was wrong, but not for the reasons you think.

Here’s something people get wrong about Joy Velasco.

They hear the story and they picture a naive girl from the province who got swept up by a rich man’s money.

A girl who didn’t know better.

A girl who was dazzled by gold and pen houses and unlimited credit cards.

That’s not who Joy was.

Joy was a strategist.

She understood something at 22 that most people never figure out.

The camera doesn’t capture reality, it creates it.

She watched girls on TikTok with half her looks and twice her following pull in brand deals, sponsorships, invitations to events that open doors to rooms she couldn’t even see yet.

And she studied them, not casually, methodically.

She figured out that the first 3 seconds of a video decide everything.

that a specific kind of smile, not too wide, not too shy, slightly conspiratorial, like you’re sharing a secret, keeps people watching longer.

That if you film yourself touching products you can’t afford, brands will eventually pay you to touch their products instead.

Her face was the product.

High cheekbones, dough eyes, a smile that made strangers feel like they were in on something.

She started posting in 2019.

makeup tutorials filmed in natural light because she couldn’t afford ring lights.

DVortia products that cost 50 pesos each applied with the precision of someone who understood that presentation is everything.

By 2020, she had 500,000 followers.

By 2021, she was doing sponsored posts for local brands.

Whitening soaps, slimming coffee, cheap jewelry with fake gems.

The money was real.

15,000 pesos per post.

That was $270.

In Anhila City, that was more than her sister Marisel made in 2 weeks working double shifts as a nurse at a provincial hospital.

But Joy watched girls in Manila flaunt their Hermes bags and Maldives vacations.

And she understood something else.

In the economy of attention, local fame has a ceiling.

Filipino brands paid Filipino prices.

Golf brands paid golf prices.

and golf prices could change her life.

So, in March 2021, Joy did something that wasn’t desperate, it was calculated.

She went to her sister Marisel, the nurse, the responsible one, the one who’d been working double since graduation, and she pitched her a business plan.

Not in those words, of course, but that’s what it was.

Lend me your savings.

I’ll go to Dubai.

I’ll film content at luxury locations.

I’ll attract golf followers.

I’ll land bigger sponsors.

I’ll pay you back in 6 months.

Marisel lent her 200,000 pesos, her entire savings.

Because Marisel believed in her sister’s brain, the way she believed in morning light, completely without question, Joy bought a plane ticket and flew to Dubai with a cracked iPhone, a carry-on full of fast fashion, and a plan that was either brilliant or suicidal, depending on how the next 60 days played out.

She didn’t know it would be both.

Dubai Gold Souk, April 2021.

Joy is walking through the display cases, filming herself.

Necklaces that cost more than her childhood home sit under glass, and she’s pretending to browse, angling her phone to catch the shimmer, narrating in that warm conspiratorial voice.

Okay, loves, help me decide.

This one or this one? She can’t afford either.

That’s not the point.

The point is the illusion.

The point is that somewhere in the Gulf, a brand manager is watching her content and thinking, “She looks like she belongs here.

” A man approaches, older, 54, but fit in the way that wealthy men are fit.

Personal trainer, private chef, nothing to do all day but maintain himself.

He’s wearing a white canura and a watch that catches the light in a way that tells you the watch costs more than the car you drove to work in.

“Are you a model?” he asks.

Joy laughs.

The laugh.

Musical, self-deprecating, irresistible.

The one she’d been practicing for 2 years.

Just a content creator, she says.

His name was Fawaz Alcasimi, real estate developer.

Divorced twice, though Joy wouldn’t learn that for months.

Worth $45 million, though she wouldn’t learn that either.

Not right away.

She’d learn it in pieces.

From the dinner at Nou in the Atlantis, where the bill was $2,000 and he didn’t blink.

From the penthouse in downtown Dubai, 92 floors up, floor toseeiling windows overlooking the Burj Khalifa.

From the engagement ring, 15 million pesos that appeared on her finger within a month.

Here’s the thing about that dinner at Nou.

Fawaz ordered for her.

Didn’t ask what she wanted, just ordered.

Joy told herself it was romantic.

A man who knew what he liked.

A man who took charge.

That’s what she wrote to Mary Cell that night.

Eight.

He’s so confident.

He just handles everything.

I don’t have to worry about anything.

She didn’t see it for what it was.

Not yet.

Because here’s what Joy was calculating while Fawaz was calculating her.

She saw wealth, access, content, a complete transformation of her brand.

Every meal was a potential Tik Tok.

Every shopping trip was sponsored content waiting to happen.

Every moment in that penthouse was proof that she had made it, that the bet she placed with Marisel’s savings had paid off beyond anything either of them imagined.

And Fawaz, what did Fawaz see? Youth, beauty, compliance.

A woman who already knew how to perform.

Who already understood that her value was tied to how well she could look happy on camera.

a woman who could be controlled because she had built her entire identity around an illusion she couldn’t afford to break.

They were both making a transaction.

They both thought they were getting the better deal.

Within a week, Joy moved out of her 3,000 peso per night Airbnb in DRA and into the penthouse.

Within 3 months, she was Mrs.

Fawaz al- Casimi.

Her Tik Tok transformed overnight.

Gone.

The Divisoria makeup tutorials, the 50 peso products, the cracked iPhone in natural light.

Now, day in my life as a Dubai wife, penthouse tours with Florida ceiling windows, shopping halls at the Dubai Mall where she once pretended to browse.

Yacht trips to Abu Dhabi, spa days that cost more than her father, Ernesto, earned driving his tricycle in an entire year.

Her followers exploded.

500,000 to 1 million to 2.

3 million in 18 months.

The comments were a wall of worship.

Sana all living the dream 8.

Filipina excellence goals talaga.

Every video a confirmation that beauty plus strategy plus the right man equals escape.

Girls in Angeles city, in Tando, in Davo, in every province where the roofs are tin and the air conditioning doesn’t work.

They watched joy and they saw possibility.

They saw proof that it could happen, that the camera could build a bridge out of poverty and into a life that looked like heaven.

Nobody asked why Joy never showed her husband’s face.

Nobody asked why she filmed alone most of the time.

Nobody asked why in every single video her smile was exactly the same.

Same angle, same curve, same teeth showing.

Perfect.

Practiced.

frozen.

The kind of smile that doesn’t reach the eyes if you look closely enough.

But nobody looks closely.

That’s the thing about 2.

3 million followers.

They’re not watching you.

They’re watching the version of you that confirms what they want to believe.

And what they wanted to believe was that Joy Velasco had escaped.

She hadn’t.

She’d just moved into a more expensive cage.

The first year was real.

Or at least it was real enough for Joy to believe it.

Fawaz was generous, not just with money, with attention, with affection, with the kind of presence that makes a woman feel like the center of someone’s universe.

He took her to business dinners and introduced her with genuine pride.

My wife, the most beautiful woman in any room.

He bought her a white Range Rover because she mentioned once that she liked the color.

He gave her an unlimited credit card and never questioned what she spent.

He told her she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

And Joy believed him.

Not because she was stupid, because the evidence supported it.

For 12 months, there were no red flags, no warnings, no moments where something felt off and she dismissed it.

Fawaz was patient, calculated.

He let her feel free because he was building a cage.

He let her furnish the prison herself.

the Tik Tok brand, the Dubai wife identity, the followers, the sponsors, all of it.

By the time the bars appeared, she’d already decorated the cell and called it home.

And that’s what makes this different from the story you’re expecting.

Joy wasn’t a passive victim swept up by wealth.

She was an active participant in building the life that would trap her.

Not because she was foolish, because the trap was designed by someone who understood that the best cages are the ones the prisoner helps construct.

Year two, the shift.

It started with the phone.

Fawaz wanted the password.

Not aggressively, casually.

I just want to make sure you’re safe.

There are bad people online.

Joy gave it to him because refusing felt like making something out of nothing.

Then the followers.

Fawaz didn’t like her responding to comments from men.

These men aren’t interested in your content.

They’re interested in my wife.

Block them.

Joy blocked them because it was easier than fighting about it.

Then the filming.

You’re spending too much time on that phone.

You’re my wife, not an entertainer.

Joy filmed less because Fawaza’s voice had started to carry a weight that made her chest tighten.

Each request felt like compromise.

Each one was surrender.

But Joy adapted.

That’s what she did.

She’d been adapting her entire life.

adapting to poverty, adapting to the algorithm, adapting to whatever the camera required.

She was good at becoming what people needed her to be.

She just didn’t realize she was becoming what Fawaz needed her to be, invisible.

The monitoring started in the second year.

Find my app on her phone.

He could see where she was at every moment.

If she left the penthouse without texting him first, the phone call came within minutes.

Where are you? Who are you with? Why didn’t you tell me? Then the accusations.

The doorman smiled at her.

The driver held the car door open for too long.

The waiter at their usual restaurant looked at her differently.

I gave you everything, Fawaz would say.

And this is how you repay me.

That sentence every time, like a key turning in a lock.

Then the parties.

Fawaz had friends, wealthy men from across the Gulf, Saudi princes, Emirati businessmen, Lebanese traders who’d made their fortunes in ways that were never quite explained.

They gathered at private villas in Palm JRA behind walls too high to see over in rooms where phones were collected at the door.

Joy was expected to attend.

She was expected to be friendly.

She was expected to wear what Fawaz chose for her and drink what was put in her hand and do things she had never agreed to do.

The first time she cried afterward.

Fawaz told her she was being dramatic.

Told her these were important men.

Told her this was how business worked in the Gulf.

Told her she should be grateful he included her.

The second time she didn’t cry.

She’d learned that crying made it worse.

The third time she understood with a clarity that sat in her stomach like cold metal.

She couldn’t leave.

Her visa was tied to Fawaz.

Under the Kafala system, her legal right to exist in the UAE depended on his sponsorship.

Without it, she’d be deported.

Not in weeks, in days.

Her money was his money.

The unlimited credit card could be cancelled with a phone call.

The Range Rover was in his name.

The penthouse was his.

Everything she touched, everything she wore, every piece of the life she showed to 2.

3 million people, none of it belonged to her.

And then there was the brand, happy Dubai wife.

That was her identity now, not just on Tik Tok, in the Filipino community, in the sponsorship market, in the way her own family talked about her.

Joy, the success story.

Joy who made it.

If she told the truth about the parties, the control, the things she was forced to do, she would lose everything.

the followers, the sponsors, the illusion she had built so carefully that she sometimes forgot it was an illusion.

She sent a WhatsApp voice not to Micell at 3:00 a.

m.

Dubai time.

You could hear it in her voice.

Not the Tik Tok voice, not the musical conspiratorial warmth.

A different voice.

Thin, cracked, barely held together.

Hindi kunakaya ate trapped a trapped here.

Marisel told her to come home.

Get on a plane.

Come back to Pampanga.

We’ll figure it out.

Joy said she couldn’t.

She was in too deep.

What she meant, what she couldn’t say out loud because saying it would make it real was that she had come too far to go back to being nobody.

That the life she showed online was the only life she had left.

That the cage was made of the same material as the dream.

And she couldn’t destroy one without destroying the other.

So she stayed and she started looking for another way out.

Joy convinced Fawaz to fund her businesses not as a vanity project, as an escape route.

If the marriage fell apart and she could feel it falling, could feel the floor tilting beneath her.

She needed assets that were hers.

Businesses she could point to and say, “I built this.

This is mine.

You can take the penthouse, the car, the credit card, but this is mine.

” Velasco clothing company launched in September 2022.

A modest fashion line for Filipino expats in the Gulf.

Abias with Filipino inpired prints, workware for nurses and hotel staff, pieces that bridged two cultures.

Joy had no business experience, no design training, no understanding of supply chains or profit margins or the difference between a concept and a product.

She had Tik Tok followers and a rich husband and the desperate belief that one of those things could save her.

Fawaz invested $500,000.

The line launched to moderate buzz.

Joyy’s followers were excited.

Brands shared her posts.

A few Dubai lifestyle magazines mentioned it.

But the clothes were overpriced for the market and poorly made for the price.

Sales collapsed within months.

By May 2023, the company was dead.

loss $480,000.

Kynan Dubai opened in December 2022 while the clothing line was still gasping.

A Filipino restaurant in Albara serving synagogue and kad to homesick OFWs who’d been eating shawarma and cafeteria rice for months.

Joy posted about it constantly.

My passion project.

But she never stepped into the kitchen.

Never tasted the food before it went on the menu.

never visited on a Tuesday night to see if actual customers were coming.

The food was mediocre.

The location was terrible.

Tucked behind a car wash, invisible from the main road.

It closed in June 2023.

Loss $290,000.

Joy Beauty launched in August 2023 a skincare line.

Joyy’s face on every product.

Her followers saw the packaging, pink boxes, gold lettering, her trademark smile, and assumed it was luxury.

It wasn’t.

The products were generic white label items manufactured in China and repackaged with pretty fonts.

The serums were the same formula you could buy on AliExpress for a fraction of the price.

Nobody bought them.

The line folded within 4 months.

Loss $195,000.

Total nearly $1 million of Fawaza’s money gone.

He was patient at first, or at least he wore the mask of patience, but by the time Joy Beauty collapsed, the mask came off.

“You’re stupid,” he told her one night.

“Drunk on whiskey,” his voice flat and cold, the way a man sounds when he’s not angry anymore.

“Just certain.

Useless, a waste of money.

I should have known better than to marry a girl from the province.

” The fights got worse.

He threw a glass at the wall.

He grabbed her arm hard enough to leave fingerprint bruises that she covered with long sleeves.

He told her that if she ever embarrassed him again, he would send her back to the Philippines with nothing.

No money, no visa, no followers, no dignity.

Just the shame of being a divorced woman who couldn’t keep her husband happy and couldn’t run a business and couldn’t do anything right.

Joy started planning.

not businesses this time, something else.

She began skimming cash from household expenses, grocery money, salon money, the kind of small withdrawals a man like Fawaz wouldn’t notice because to him 5,000 dirhams was what he tipped at dinner.

By March 2023, she had a safe deposit box at a bank in Al Ria opened under her maiden name, Velasco.

Nobody connected it to the wife of Fawaz Al Casimi.

She deposited every peso she could take without triggering suspicion.

By June, there was half a million pesos in the box.

By October, it was 1.

2 million.

By January 2024, it was 2.

4 million pesos.

Her escape fund, her proof that she existed outside of him.

her evidence that somewhere beneath the Dubai wife, beneath the tick- tock smile, beneath the woman Fawaz had constructed to serve his purposes, Joy Velasco was still in there, still thinking, still planning, still desperate enough to do something unforgivable.

Because by January 2024, Joy had heard about a man named Ronaldo Bong Dalisi.

Every Filipino community has someone like Bong, a fixer, 42 years old, 15 years in the Gulf.

He was the man you called when your employer was holding your passport and the embassy wouldn’t return your calls.

When your roommate was stealing from you and you had no police report to file, when you needed paperwork that didn’t exist or documents that weren’t entirely real or solutions to problems that the legal system wasn’t designed to solve.

He was a driver, a translator, a facilitator.

He helped OFWs find apartments, navigate visa offices, send money home through channels that didn’t charge 40% fees.

He existed in the gray space between what the law allowed and what survival required.

Most of the Filipinos who used his services considered him a lifeline.

Joy didn’t need a lifeline.

She needed something else entirely.

She met Bong at a Starbucks in JBR on the morning of February 11th, 2024.

She was crying.

Real tears, not the performance tears she’d perfected for content.

Her mascara was running.

Her hands were shaking.

She told him her husband was abusive.

She told him about the monitoring, the accusations, the control.

She told him about the parties, the private villas, the phones collected at the door, the things she was made to do.

She told him she was trapped, that her visa was a leash, that her money was imaginary, that every exit she’d tried to build had collapsed.

Then she asked, “Do you know anyone who can make a problem disappear?” Bong looked at her.

He didn’t blink.

He’d heard strange requests before, but this was different.

This was a woman with 2.

3 million followers and a face that appeared on billboards asking him in a Starbucks across from a beach to arrange a murder.

“I know people,” he said.

“It will cost 2 million pesos.

” Joy didn’t hesitate.

She’d been building toward this for months, maybe longer.

Maybe since the first time she cried after one of those parties and Fawaz told her she was being dramatic.

Maybe since the night he called her stupid and useless and grabbed her hard enough to leave marks.

Maybe since the moment she understood that the Kafala system wasn’t a bureaucratic detail, it was a chain.

She gave Bong 2 million pesos in cash from the safe deposit box, from the escape fund she’d spent 18 months building.

He told her it would be done within a week.

He told her to act normal.

He told her to post on TikTok like nothing was wrong.

Joy went home and filmed a video.

Quick grocery haul loves trying this new organic market in JLT.

Her smile was perfect.

Her voice was warm.

340,000 views.

She didn’t know that the man she’d just paid to save her life had no intention of saving anything except himself.

Bong Dalasai had no hitman contacts.

He had no assassin network.

He had no plan to kill Fawaz Kasimi or anyone else.

What he had was 2 million pesos in cash and a recording of their entire Starbucks conversation.

He’d recorded it on his phone.

Every word, the crying, the confession about the parties, the request to make a problem disappear, the agreement on price, all of it.

That night at 10:47 p.

m.

Dubai time, Bong made a phone call.

Fawaz Alcasimi answered on the second ring.

Your wife just paid me 2 million pesos to have you killed.

Bong said, “I thought you should know.

” Silence on the line.

3 seconds 4 5.

Then Fawaz spoke and his voice was calm.

Not shocked, not frightened.

Calm.

The voice of a man who processes information the way he processes real estate deals.

Quickly, coldly, with an immediate calculation of value.

How much do you want to tell me everything? 5 million pesos.

Fawaz agreed without negotiating.

He was a businessman.

He understood leverage.

And 5 million pesos, roughly $90,000, was nothing compared to what his wife’s betrayal had just handed him.

Bong delivered the recording.

He delivered the 2 million pesos in cash, evidence of intent.

He delivered everything Joy had given him.

Everything Joy had trusted him with.

Every piece of her desperation converted into ammunition for the man she was trying to escape.

Fawaz now had proof that his wife had solicited his murder.

Under UAE law, that was enough to destroy her completely.

No divorce settlement, no alimony, deportation, disgrace, criminal prosecution.

He could have gone to the police.

He could have filed for divorce with evidence that would have left Joy with nothing.

But Fawaz didn’t go to the police.

He didn’t file for divorce.

He called Tariq Hammoodi.

Tariq was Lebanese, 58 years old.

He’d been Fuaz’s lawyer.

The word lawyer doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence for 20 years.

He handled problems, contract problems, partner problems, problems with women, the kind of problems that required solutions which didn’t appear in any legal code or any courtroom filing.

I want this handled quietly, Fawaz told him.

No police, no courts, no publicity.

Tariq understood.

He always understood.

That was what 20 years of service to men like Fawaz had taught him.

How to understand without asking questions.

how to solve problems that weren’t supposed to have solutions.

It will be done, Tariq said.

Three words.

That’s all it took.

Three words and the machinery of money and silence and power began moving.

And Joy Velasco, still in the penthouse, still filming Tik Toks, still smiling that frozen smile for 2.

3 million people who had no idea what was coming, had no idea that her own escape plan had become her death warrant.

Here’s a question for you.

Joy tried to have her husband killed.

That’s a fact.

She walked into a Starbucks with 2 million pesos and paid a stranger to murder the man she married.

There’s no way around that.

No amount of context erases it.

She made a choice and it was a terrible one.

But here’s the thing.

The man she tried to kill, he’s about to do worse.

And unlike Joy, he’s going to get away with it.

If that infuriates you, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe because we’re not done.

What happens on Valentine’s Day is the part of this story that will keep you up tonight.

Here’s a question that’s going to sit with you.

If a trapped woman tries to kill the man who’s trapping her and that man kills her instead, who’s the murderer? Think about it because what happened next will test everything you believe about justice.

February 14th, 2024, Valentine’s Day.

Joy woke up early.

She had learned to compartmentalize, to split herself into the woman behind the camera and the woman behind the woman.

The Tik Tok version of Joy bounced out of bed and filmed herself in the mirror.

The real Joy hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t stopped checking her phone for a message from Bong since February 12th.

He hadn’t called, hadn’t texted, hadn’t answered when she reached out.

But it was Valentine’s Day and the camera was waiting.

So Joy became the character.

She put on the smile.

The same angle, the same curve, the same teeth, and she performed.

Happy Valentine’s Day, loves.

Spending the day with my forever.

She showed the roses.

She showed the Cardier box.

She blew the kiss.

The video went live at 9:00 a.

m.

downstairs.

Fawaz was having breakfast, reading his phone, drinking his coffee.

He looked up when Joy came down and said nothing.

smiled, wished her happy Valentine’s Day in a voice that was perfectly normal, perfectly measured.

Because Fawaz had been performing, too.

For 3 days, since Bong’s phone call, he had been performing the role of a man who didn’t know his wife had tried to have him killed, and he was better at it than she was.

At 2 p.

m.

, Joy left the penthouse.

She told Fawaz she was going to the salon.

She went to the bank in Alriga instead.

The safe deposit box.

the remaining 400,000 pesos, her emergency fund, her last exit, the money that was supposed to buy a plane ticket home if everything went wrong.

Everything had gone wrong.

The box was empty.

Joy stared at the empty box for what the bank clerk later described as a very long time.

She didn’t cry, didn’t speak, just stood there with her hands on the edges of the box, looking at the nothing inside it.

Then she asked the clerk what happened.

The bank said her husband had accessed the box that morning.

Court order, legal, clean.

The money was gone.

Joy walked out of the bank.

She stood on the sidewalk on Alriga Street surrounded by gold shops and phone repair stalls and money exchange offices.

And she tried to call Bong.

No answer.

She tried again.

No answer.

She called Muddy Cell.

The call went to voicemail.

She was standing in one of the most crowded neighborhoods in Dubai, surrounded by thousands of people.

And she was completely alone.

Every exit sealed, every escape route collapsed, the money gone, the fixer gone, her sister’s phone ringing out.

At 6 p.

m.

, she sent one last WhatsApp message to Marisel.

May Gagawin Ako ate.

Wish me luck.

I’m going to do something.

Wish me luck.

Marisel was asleep.

7-hour time difference between Dubai and Pampanga.

She wouldn’t see the message until the next morning.

By then, it would be too late by hours.

What happened between 6:00 p.

m.

and 11:47 p.

m.

? Nobody knows.

Not for certain.

5 hours and 47 minutes of silence.

Joy was in the penthouse.

Fawaz was in the penthouse.

Two people in 92 floors of glass and steel and imported marble.

One of them knowing what was coming and one of them about to find out.

Did they eat dinner? Did they talk? Did Joy confront him about the safe deposit box? Did Fawaz tell her what he knew? Did she beg? Did she fight? Did she try to leave? Nobody knows.

The only person who could answer those questions is still alive and has never answered a single one of them.

11:47 p.

m.

Building security receives a call from the penthouse.

A woman’s voice, hysterical.

There’s been an accident.

When they arrived, they found Joy in the master bathroom.

Single gunshot wound to the head, a pistol in her right hand, a Glock 19, registered to Fawaz Alcasimi.

No signs of forced entry, no signs of struggle.

The penthouse was immaculate.

Floors clean, surfaces wiped, not a cushion out of place.

The kind of clean that doesn’t happen after a suicide.

The kind of clean that happens after a job.

Dubai police arrived at 12:15 a.

m.

By 2 a.

m.

they had ruled it a suicide.

Case closed.

Think about that timeline.

2 hours.

A woman is found dead with a bullet in her head holding her husband’s gun in a penthouse that’s been scrubbed clean.

And the investigation takes 2 hours in a city with some of the most advanced forensic capabilities in the world.

2 hours.

Fawaz Alcasimi released a statement through his lawyer the following afternoon.

The words were polished.

Careful.

The kind of careful that comes from a man who’s had 24 hours and a professional crisis team to craft his grief.

My wife Javelin struggled with mental health issues that she hid from the world.

Behind her beautiful smile was a woman in tremendous pain.

I am devastated by her loss and ask for privacy as I grieve.

I loved her more than words can say.

The statement was posted on Joyy’s Tik Tok account.

Her Tik Tok account.

The one she’d built from nothing.

The one she’d created with a cracked iPhone and 50 peso makeup and a smile she practiced until it was perfect.

The platform that was the only thing in her life that was truly entirely hers.

Fawaz controlled it now.

He changed the password.

He posted his statement as a pinned comment.

He disabled comments on every video.

2.

3 million followers opened the app expecting another day in my life as a Dubai wife.

Instead, they got a eulogy written by the man who killed her delivered through the dead woman’s own voice.

And they couldn’t even respond.

The comments were off.

The conversation was over.

The man who took her life took her platform, too.

Filipino media picked up the story within hours.

Tik Tok star found dead in Dubai penthouse.

Filipina influencer dies on Valentine’s Day.

The headlines were sympathetic at first.

A beautiful woman, a tragic ending, the invisible pressures of social media fame.

Commentators talked about mental health awareness, about the dark side of influencer culture, about how we never really know what’s happening behind the screen.

They were right about that last part.

They just had no idea how right they were because Joyy’s sister Marisel didn’t believe it.

Not for a second.

Marisel Velasco was 32 years old, a nurse who worked double shifts at a provincial hospital for 18,000 pesos a month.

She was the sensible sister, the practical one, the one who lent Joy 200,000 pesos and never asked for it back because she loved her sister more than money.

She was also the one who’d received that 3:00 a.

m.

voice note.

The one who knew Joy was trapped.

The one who knew the Dubai wife fantasy was a prison with marble floors.

She flew to Dubai 3 days after Joyy’s death alone carrying a folder of documents she’d printed at an internet cafe in Anhilly City.

Joyy’s WhatsApp messages, screenshots of conversations, the voice note she’d never deleted.

She went to the Dubai police headquarters and demanded to see the investigation file, the police report, the autopsy results, the forensic analysis, the evidence.

She was given nothing.

Privacy laws, they told her.

Ongoing investigation, they told her.

Except there was no ongoing investigation.

The case had been closed before Joyy’s body reached the morg.

Suicide.

Case closed.

No further action required.

Marisel started asking questions.

Not to the police.

They’d made it clear she was an inconvenience.

A grieving Filipina making noise in a system that wasn’t designed to hear her.

She asked the questions to anyone who would listen.

to the Filipino community in Dubai, to journalists, to the Philippine embassy, to social media.

Question one, why did Joy send a message saying I’m going to do something 4 hours before her death? My gagawuckle.

That’s not the language of someone planning to die.

That’s the language of someone planning to fight.

Someone who still had a move left.

Someone who thought there was still time.

Question two.

Why did Joy have 15 Tik Tok videos scheduled to post over the next month? 15.

She had filmed them in the days before Valentine’s Day.

Content planned, edited, captioned, scheduled.

People who are planning to die don’t schedule content.

They don’t think about next Tuesday’s posting schedule.

Joy was planning a future.

Even a woman in a cage plans for tomorrow if she believes tomorrow exists.

Question three.

The timing.

Joy paid Bong on February 11th.

Bong told her it would be done within a week.

Joy died on February 14th.

3 days.

The exact time frame a professional hit takes when the target is accessible.

And the client has paid in full.

She paid for a hit that took 3 days.

Someone died in 3 days.

Just not the right person.

Question four.

And this is the one that changed everything.

When Marisel accessed Joyy’s Tik Tok drafts folder, because Marisel knew her sister’s passwords the way sisters do, the birthday plus middlename formula Joy used for everything, she found a video that had never been posted.

Joy was sitting on the edge of her bed.

No makeup, no ring light, no smile.

She was looking directly at the camera and her eyes were clear.

Not crying, not performing, just clear.

the way a person looks when they’ve stopped pretending.

If something happens to me, Joy said, “Look at my husband.

He’s not who you think he is.

” That was it.

13 words.

Filmed sometime in the weeks before her death.

Saved in drafts, never published.

A dead woman’s warning, sitting in a folder, waiting for someone to find it.

Joy had known.

She knew this was possible.

She knew that the man she was trying to escape might turn the escape into a grave.

And she’d done the only thing she knew how to do.

She’d made a video.

Recorded her own warning the way she’d recorded everything else in her life through a lens for an audience, hoping someone would see it.

But nobody saw it.

Not until it was too late.

Marisel played the video 47 times.

She counted.

Each time she heard her sister’s voice say the same 13 words, and each time the words cut deeper, because Joy had prepared for this, she’d recorded evidence of her own murder before it happened.

And it still wasn’t enough.

After the revelation, after the coverup, after the 2-hour investigation, after Fawaz posted his grief performance on Joyy’s own account, the Philippine government issued what they called a strong request for cooperation from the UAE.

It went nowhere.

Diplomatic language that meant nothing.

Press releases that dissolved on contact with reality.

Marisel went home to Pimpanga.

She buried her sister in the same cemetery where their mother Luris was buried 3 years earlier.

She stood at the grave and she didn’t cry.

Not because she wasn’t broken, because she decided that crying was something you do when there’s nothing left to fight for.

And Marisel had something to fight for.

She had 13 words on a video.

She had a timeline that didn’t add up.

She had a police investigation that lasted 2 hours.

And she had a dead sister who deserved more than a lie carved into a headstone.

Months passed.

The story faded from Filipino media the way stories about dead Filipinos always fade.

Quickly, quietly, replaced by the next tragedy, the next headline, the next body coming home from the Gulf in a box.

Joyy’s Tik Tok account was still active.

The videos were still there.

Her smile was still playing on loop for an algorithm that didn’t know she was gone.

Every day, new people discovered her content, followed her, left comments on videos filmed by a dead woman.

Where have you been 8? Haven’t posted in a while.

Hope you’re okay.

We miss you.

They didn’t know.

The comments were still disabled on her last post.

Fawaza’s statement pinned at the top.

The only explanation they’d ever get from her account.

Some followers figured it out.

Most didn’t.

The algorithm kept serving her content to strangers who had no idea they were watching a corpse perform happiness.

Then 6 months later, a crack.

It happened in Manila, not Dubai, not in a courtroom, not in a police station, in an NBI interrogation room where a 42-year-old fixer named Ronaldo Bong Dalis was sweating through his shirt over a completely unrelated fraud case.

Bong had been arrested for a scheme involving fake employment contracts for OFWs, selling worthless documents to desperate workers for 5,000 pesos each, promising jobs in Qatar and Bahrain that didn’t exist.

Small-time fraud, the kind of thing that gets you a few years in a Philippine prison and a footnote in a local newspaper.

But during interrogation, NBI agents noticed something in his financials that didn’t match.

Large deposits that had no corresponding income.

money that appeared in his accounts from sources he couldn’t explain.

Specifically, 5 million pesos deposited on February 12th, 2024, 2 days before Joy Velasco died.

They pressed him on it.

Where did this money come from? Bong had a story.

Then he had a different story.

Then he had a third story that contradicted the first two.

They pressed harder.

He broke.

And when he broke, everything spilled out in a flood of weeping confession that the NBI agents recorded on three separate devices because they could tell within the first 30 seconds that this was bigger than fake employment contracts.

Joy Velasco paid him 2 million pesos to arrange her husband’s murder.

He took the money.

He had no hitman contacts, no plan, no network.

He recorded their conversation on his phone.

That night he called Fawaz al- Casimi and sold her out for 5 million pesos.

Delivered the recording, delivered the cash, delivered everything.

Then he walked away.

Took the money, 7 million pesos total, the two from Joy and the five from Fawaz.

And he walked away thinking it was a clean profit, a simple transaction, information for cash.

I swear to God, Bong said, crying in the interrogation room, his face wet and ugly and terrified.

I thought he would just divorce her.

I didn’t know they were going to kill her.

I thought he would use it in court.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know.

He didn’t know.

That’s what he said.

He didn’t know that selling a woman’s desperate secrets to the man she was trying to escape would get her killed.

He didn’t know that a man who pays 5 million pesos for proof of his wife’s betrayal isn’t building a divorce case.

He’s building an alibi.

Maybe he really didn’t know.

Maybe he told himself that because it was easier than the truth.

The truth being he didn’t care.

He didn’t care enough to think about what would happen next.

He pocketed 7 million pesos and he didn’t spend a single second wondering what Fawaz would do with the information.

Because Joy wasn’t a person to Bong.

She was a payday.

6 years of this.

40 years.

That’s what the judge gave him.

They’ve been through the betrayal.

They’ve been through the murder.

Now, let me tell you what the NBI pieced together about what really happened that night.

Fawaz had called Tariq Hammoodi.

Tariq, the Lebanese lawyer who’d been cleaning up Fawaz’s messes for two decades.

Tariq, who understood without being told.

Tariq, who said, “It will be done like he was confirming a dinner reservation.

Tariq arranged professionals, not local, not traceable.

Men who specialized in making problems disappear.

men who knew how to enter a building without being seen, subdue a person without leaving marks, and stage a scene that would satisfy any investigation that wasn’t looking too hard.

They entered the penthouse on Valentine’s night, sometime between 6:00 p.

m.

and 11:47 p.

m.

During those 5 hours and 47 minutes of silence that nobody can account for, they subdued Joy.

They staged her death.

The Glock 19 was Fawaza’s gun.

Joy had never touched a firearm in her life.

Her fingerprints were on the grip, placed there, pressed onto the metal while she was unconscious or already dead.

The angle of the wound was wrong, inconsistent with self-infliction.

A person shooting themselves in the head does it from a specific angle.

The physics of it are non-negotiable.

The angle of Joyy’s wound didn’t match.

An independent forensic expert hired by the Velasco family confirmed this months later.

The penthouse was cleaned professionally.

That’s not grief.

That’s evidence destruction.

You don’t mop floors and wipe surfaces and arrange a body while you’re in shock.

You do it when you have a protocol.

When you’ve done this before.

By 2 in the morning, it was over.

Dubai police arrived, surveyed the scene, took Fawaz’s statement.

My wife had been struggling with mental health issues and closed the case.

Two hours investigation complete.

You’ve been through this whole story.

The cage she was in.

The plan that got her killed.

The man who walks free 92 floors above the street where his wife died.

If you’ve come this far, you’re not leaving now.

Subscribe because this is the part where we find out what justice looks like when the system was never built to deliver it.

Philippine authorities formally requested the extradition of Fawaz al- Kasimi.

The UAE refused.

Fawaz was an Emirati citizen from a connected family.

His real estate portfolio alone was worth tens of millions.

His social network included men whose names appeared in government directories and corporate boards and the kind of lists that don’t get published.

He would never see the inside of a courtroom, never sit across from a prosecutor, never answer a single question under oath about what happened in that penthouse between 6:00 p.

m.

and 11:47 p.

m.

on Valentine’s Day.

The extradition request was denied in language that was polite and diplomatic and absolutely final.

The UAE does not extradite its citizens.

That’s not a failure of the system.

That’s the system working exactly as designed.

Here’s what justice looked like.

Ronaldo Bong Dallas was charged as an accessory to murder.

The trial lasted three weeks.

The evidence was overwhelming.

His own confession, the financial records, the recording he’d made of Joyy’s desperation.

He didn’t contest the charges couldn’t.

Everything pointed at him.

Sentenced to 40 years in Blebid prison.

He’ll be 82 years old when he’s eligible for release.

Tariq Hammoodi disappeared.

His office in Dubai was closed.

His phone was disconnected.

His apartment was vacated.

Some people in the Lebanese community in Dubai said he’d gone back to Beirut.

Others said he was still in the city, operating under a different name, protected by the same architecture of money and silence that had protected his clients for 20 years.

Nobody found him.

Nobody looked very hard.

Fawaz al- Casimi remained in his penthouse 92 floors above the ground.

The same penthouse where his wife was killed.

the same bathroom where her blood was cleaned from the marble tiles.

Untouched by investigation, untouched by consequence, untouched by anything except maybe the knowledge of what he’d done.

But men like Fawaz don’t lose sleep over women like Joy.

They lose sleep over real estate deals and stock fluctuations and the possibility that someone somewhere might be more powerful than they are.

Joy was a problem.

Tariq solved the problem.

The problem is solved.

Move on.

That’s the asymmetry that should make you sick.

The fixer who sold Joyy’s secrets gets 40 years.

The man who ordered her death gets nothing.

The lawyer who arranged it vanished into thin air.

The police who closed the case in 2 hours went home and had dinner with their families.

Justice was served, just not to the person who deserved it most.

Marisel Velasco held a press conference outside the Manila Regional Trial Court on the day of Bong sentencing.

She was wearing white.

In the Philippines, white is the color of mourning.

She was holding a framed photograph of joy.

The real joy, not the Tik Tok joy.

In the photo, her sister was laughing, head thrown back, eyes bright with a happiness that might have been real once before Dubai, before Fawaz, before the smile became a mask.

The cameras pointed at her.

Reporters shouted questions.

Marisel waited for silence.

“My sister made mistakes,” she said.

Her voice was steady, controlled.

the voice of a woman who has spent months preparing to say exactly the right words because she might only get one chance and the world might only listen once.

She was desperate.

She was trapped in a marriage with a monster and she saw no way out.

Does that excuse what she tried to do? No.

But she didn’t deserve to die for it.

She paused, looked directly at the cameras, not at the reporters.

at the cameras, at the lenses, at the millions of people she knew would eventually see this footage.

Fawaz Alcasimi murdered my sister.

His lawyer arranged it.

His money covered it up.

And he’s walking free in Dubai right now, probably drinking champagne in the same penthouse where my sister took her last breath.

Because he’s rich, because he’s connected, because she was just a Filipina.

Her voice cracked for the first time, just once.

just for a moment.

Then it steadied again.

Joy left Bampanga because she wanted a better life.

She wanted to escape poverty.

She wanted to be someone.

And the world told her that if she was beautiful enough, if she smiled enough, if she married the right man, she could have everything.

That’s the lie we tell our daughters.

That’s the lie my sister believed.

And it killed her.

She held up the photograph.

Her name was Jovalin Velasco.

She was 28 years old.

She had 2.

3 million followers who thought she was living the dream.

And now she’s gone.

And the man who killed her is free.

And I’m supposed to accept that because that’s how the world works.

Marisel shook her head.

Slow, deliberate.

The way you shake your head when you’re not disagreeing.

You’re refusing.

Refusing to accept.

Refusing to move on.

Refusing to let the world do what it does best, which is forget.

I don’t accept it.

I’ll never accept it.

and I’ll say her name until someone listens.

Javelin Velasco, remember her name.

The cameras flashed.

The reporters shouted.

Marisel turned and walked away, clutching the photograph to her chest, disappearing into the hallway of the courthouse where Justice was supposed to live, but didn’t always show up.

Here’s what sits with me.

Joy Velasco tried to have her husband killed.

That’s attempted murder.

She broke the law.

She paid 2 million pesos to end a human life.

No amount of context erases that choice.

She made it.

She owned it.

But Joy was also a woman who was abused, who was monitored and controlled and forced to do things at parties she never consented to.

Who was trapped by a visa system that made her husband her jailer and a culture that told her losing the marriage meant losing everything.

who was isolated from her family, from her country, from any legal protection that might have helped her, who lived in a country where women who report domestic abuse are sometimes imprisoned for it.

Does one cancel the other? Does being a victim excuse becoming a perpetrator, or does it just explain it? And then there’s the system.

Dubai police closed the case in 2 hours, ruled suicide before the forensic evidence was fully processed.

An Emirati citizen from a connected family kills a Filipino migrant wife in a city built on the labor of migrants and the system functions exactly as designed.

It’s not that the system was broken.

The system worked perfectly efficiently.

That’s the terrifying part.

And then there’s us, you and me, and the 2.

3 million people who watched Joyy’s life for 3 years and never asked the right questions.

Who saw the smile and believed it.

who typed sana all and living the dream under videos that were filmed by a woman being destroyed behind every frame.

Who consumed the illusion and called it inspiration? Who’s responsible for what we choose not to see? I’m not going to answer that.

That’s not my job.

My job is to tell you what happened.

And I’ve told you Fawaz Alcasimi is in his penthouse 92 floors above the ground untouched.

Joyy’s Tik Tok account is still live, still generating views, still controlled by him.

Her videos play on loop.

A dead woman performing happiness for an algorithm that doesn’t know she’s gone.

New followers discover her every day.

They watch the shopping halls and the penthouse tours and the spa days.

And they don’t know that the woman smiling at them was killed by the man behind the camera.

Bong Dalisai is in Bibbid prison.

40 years.

He sold a woman’s life for 7 million pesos.

Two from Joy, five from Fawaz.

Now he has nothing but concrete walls and the sound of his own confession playing on a loop in his head.

Tariq Hammoodi is gone, erased.

The kind of man who exists only when powerful people need him and disappears the moment he becomes inconvenient.

He’ll surface again.

Men like Tariq always do.

under different names in different cities, solving different problems for different men who can afford to make problems go away.

And Marisel Velasco is still in Pimpanga, still working doubles at the provincial hospital.

Still going home to the same two- room house near the Friendship Highway where she and Joy grew up, listening to planes take off from Clark Air Base.

Still fighting, still saying her sister’s name to anyone who will listen.

Still waiting for someone with more power than she has to do the things she can’t do alone.

She keeps the photograph on her nightstand.

Joy laughing, head thrown back.

Real happiness or something close to it from before.

Joyy’s followers are still there.

2.

3 million accounts still following a dead woman’s page.

Some know she’s gone, some don’t.

Some are still commenting on videos she filmed months before she died, typing hearts and fire emojis under content created by hands that no longer exist.

The algorithm keeps serving her to new people because the algorithm doesn’t know about death.

It only knows about engagement.

And Joy Velasco, even dead, still engages.

Her scheduled videos posted automatically after her death.

For 2 weeks, new content appeared on her account.

Videos she’d filmed in the days before Valentine’s Day, edited and captioned, and queued up for a future she wouldn’t reach.

Followers who didn’t know she was dead saw fresh posts from a ghost, left comments, hit like, shared with friends.

A dead woman’s smile performing for strangers generating metrics for a platform that would never mourn her.

That’s the crulest part, isn’t it? Not the bullet, not the cover up, not the 2-hour investigation or the denied extradition or the man who walks free while the fixer rots in prison.

The crulest part is that the machine keeps running.

The content keeps playing, the smile keeps smiling, and nobody turns it off.

Her name was Joelyn Velasco.

She was 28 years old.

She grew up in a two- room house in Pampanga.

She had a sister who loved her, a face that opened doors, and a brain sharp enough to build an audience of millions from nothing.

She made terrible choices, and she paid for them with her life.

The man who killed her made worse choices and paid nothing.

She had 2.

3 million followers who thought she was living the dream.

She wasn’t.

And now she’s gone.

And the man who killed her is counting on you forgetting her name.

Don’t.

If you made it to the end, you spent the last 40some minutes with a woman most of the world forgot the week after she died.

That matters.

Not to me, to her, to Marisel, to every woman trapped in a marriage that looks like a dream from the outside and feels like a coffin from the inside.

If you think more people should hear this story, share it.

If you want more cases like this, cases the headlines got wrong, cases the system buried, subscribe.

This is where we tell the stories that no one else will.

And tell me in the comments, what would you have done in Joyy’s position? Trapped, abused, no legal exit, your entire identity built on a lie you can’t afford to break.

Your visa held by the man hurting you.

your money controlled by the man who controls everything else.

Would you have done what she did? Would you have found another way? Or would you have kept smiling for the camera and hoped it got better? I read every comment, every single one.

Take care of yourselves out there.

Pay attention to the people you love.

Sometimes the signs are right in front of us.

We just have to look past the smile.

Joelyn Velasco.

Remember her name.