After surviving a near-fatal throat slashing, 13-year-old Sullivan Clarke made national headlines for the violent attack—though he went viral for an entirely different reason.
When Clarke appeared on Fox News alongside his parents, viewers became fixated on his visibly unimpressed and sarcastic facial expressions and blunt responses during the interview.
Soon after, clips of the teenager reacting with dry humor and apparent annoyance quickly spread across TikTok, X, and Facebook, turning the serious segment into an unlikely viral meme.
Who is Sullivan Clarke?
Sullivan Clarke is a 13-year-old boy who was brutally attacked in Daytona Beach on Feb. 16, 2026. The attack received a significant amount of local and national media coverage.
On Feb. 18, the teen appeared on Fox host Laura Ingraham's show, The Ingraham Angle, with his parents.
As Sullivan's mother talked dramatically about Sullivan's experience, the teenager pulled faces at the camera, insinuating that she was over-exaggerating her account of the attack.
"He's had nightmares. We don't know. Hopefully, we are fine," the boy's mother, Lori, told Ingraham. While she says this, Sullivan looks surprised and annoyed, as if no nightmares had been had, and everything was fine.
"I don't think it should have to be like that, you know," said the teen. "It's kind of dumb."
"Well, there goes the lawsuit"
X, TikTok, and Facebook users re-circulated the clip, finding the teenager hilarious, especially in light of the viciousness of the incident.
"Those pain meds were treating him right," one X user commented.
"Well, there goes the lawsuit," said another.
"Bro just wanted to Aura Farm and his mom is on TV spilling his secrets…" wrote a third.
"I’ve closely observed this species of teen males in the wild, & this is a perfect example of how they can be just freaking horrible & absolutely glorious all at the same time," said X user @NikiSolis.
What happened during the Daytona Beach attack
On Feb. 14, 2026, the 13-year-old and his family were spending time on the Daytona Beach Boardwalk. While talking on the phone and walking with his parents, Sullivan was violently attacked.
“Out of nowhere, he came with a box cutter like that behind me and got this side of my neck…I happened to be turning my head at the time. So he just missed this part of my throat,” the teenager told The New York Post. “And he also, by some miracle, didn’t hit my jugular either.”
After receiving 13 stitches for his injury, doctors told the family that if the cut had been one millimeter deeper, the attack would have been fatal.
The perpetrator was Jermaine Lynn Long, a registered sex offender and career criminal who was released just four days before the random attack on the teen.
Long faces pending charges from an incident in January when he allegedly assaulted two men with a knife and an eight-foot pole. A mere 20 minutes before the assault assault, Long was suspected of attacking another man with a sledgehammer.
Thankfully, Sullivan seems to be doing okay...but his mom? Well, she's probably a little pissed.
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