In the quiet, suburban rhythm of family life, there are phone calls every parent silently prays they will never receive. It is the sudden, piercing ringing of a mobile phone in the dead of night—the kind that instantly shatters reality and divides a life into a clear, agonizing “before” and “after.”
For Andrea and Paul Haynes, that nightmare unfolded on what was supposed to be a completely ordinary Friday night. Their 13-year-old daughter, Esra, had gone to a friend’s house for a standard weekend sleepover. She was a vibrant, fiercely athletic teenager from Don Valley, Victoria—a Year 8 student who co-captained her local football and netball teams, raced BMX bikes alongside her brothers, and had recently led her dance squad to a national aerobics championship in Queensland.
“It was just the regular routine of going to hang out with her mates,” her mother, Andrea, would later recall.
Her father, Paul, echoed the horrifying suddenness of the moment: “We always knew where she was and we knew who she was with. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary… To get this phone call at that time of night was one of the calls no parent ever wants to receive, and we unfortunately got that call: ‘Come and get your daughter.’”
When her parents arrived at the scene, the cheerful innocence of a teenage sleepover had dissolved into chaotic terror. Emergency paramedics were desperately trying to revive the 13-year-old on the floor.
It was in that frantic, terrifying moment that Andrea first heard a word that would haunt her family forever: chroming.
The Anatomy of a Lethal Trend
To the uninitiated, “chroming”—also commonly referred to as huffing or sniffing—sounds like a harmless piece of internet slang. In reality, it is a deadly recreational trend circulating heavily across social media platforms like TikTok. It involves the intentional inhalation of toxic chemical fumes from everyday, household aerosol cans—such as deodorant spray, paint, hairspray, lighter fluid, or permanent markers—to achieve an immediate, short-term high.
Because these items are sitting openly on bathroom counters or sold legally on supermarket shelves for a few dollars, teenagers frequently underestimate their lethality. But the physiological toll is instant and devastating. Inhaling these volatile substances deprives the brain of oxygen and saturates the bloodstream with toxic solvents, capable of triggering sudden cardiac arrest, violent seizures, severe brain damage, organ failure, or instant suffocation—even on a teenager’s very first attempt.
On that tragic night, Esra had inhaled fumes from a simple aerosol deodorant can.
As the toxic chemicals entered her system, her young body began to shut down almost immediately. Her friends on the scene, lacking medical awareness, initially assumed she was suffering from a hyperventilating panic attack. By the time emergency crews were summoned, Esra was already in full cardiac arrest.
Eight Days of Hope, and an Unthinkable Choice
Esra was rushed to the hospital, where medical staff placed her on advanced life support. For eight grueling days, her parents, alongside her devastated siblings—Imogen, Seth, and Charlie—clung fiercely to hope. Esra was a strong, healthy athlete with a powerful heart and resilient lungs; surely, they reasoned, her young body would find a way to fight back.
But the chemical damage to her central nervous system was absolute.
On the eighth day, doctors delivered the crushing truth: the prolonged oxygen deprivation had caused catastrophic, irreversible brain damage. There was no path to recovery. Andrea and Paul were faced with the most excruciating decision any mother or father could ever be asked to make—the decision to turn off the machines keeping their baby girl alive.
During a deeply emotional appearance on Australia’s A Current Affair, the grieving parents opened up to host Ally Langdon about those final, agonizing moments in the intensive care unit.
Langdon, a mother of two herself, struggled openly to hold back her tears as Paul described how the family gathered around the hospital bed to say their final goodbyes.
“It was a very, very difficult thing to do to such a young soul,” Paul shared, his voice heavy with grief. “She was put onto a bed so we could lay with her. We cuddled her until the end.”
A Broken Family’s Mission to Save Others
In the wake of Esra’s passing, the Haynes family has been left entirely shattered. The loss has echoed far beyond their front door, sending shockwaves through their local sports clubs, schools, and the broader Victorian community.
“It was really devastating, devastating for everyone involved, all her friends as well,” Paul said. “It’s been the most difficult, traumatic time any parent could go through. We haven’t been sleeping, we’ve hardly been eating, we haven’t been smiling—we’re not ourselves… We’ve got the pictures in our mind which will never be erased, of what we were confronted with. Our gut was ripped out.”
Yet out of their profound agony, Andrea and Paul have launched an urgent national crusade to educate families about the hidden dangers lurking inside their own bathroom cabinets.
What haunts Esra’s parents most is the realization that they had never even heard of “chroming” until the night it stole their daughter’s life. Had they known, Paul says, it would have been an immediate topic of conversation at their dinner table.
“If we were educated and the word had been put out there, we would have had the discussion around our kitchen table for sure,” Paul stressed. “We need to ramp it up and let these kids find out the information first-hand, and not through friends, and not through social media—then they’re given the right advice off the bat.”
Opening the Kitchen Table Conversation
Chroming is not a new phenomenon, but its rapid amplification through algorithmic social media feeds has brought it into the bedrooms of increasingly younger children. Since 2009, the practice has claimed the lives of numerous children across Australia and globally, leaving behind a trail of devastated families who were caught completely off guard.
Paul and Andrea are now urging parents everywhere not to wait for a tragedy before breaking the silence. They are pleading with mothers and fathers to actively initiate gentle, honest conversations with their children about the lethal realities of inhaling household products.
“Parents need to sit and have a chat to their children, and just open that conversation up gently with them,” Paul urged. “We certainly didn’t know what was going on.”
Esra Haynes was a bright, talented, and deeply loved young girl with her whole life ahead of her. While nothing can undo the devastating loss her family has endured, her legacy now lives on in a powerful, lifesaving warning to parents worldwide: talk to your children today, because a simple conversation could be the one thing that saves a life.