Like many things of great consequence, it all started with "Ice Ice Baby." Adalia Rose Williams, at the age of five years, made a video of herself dancing to the Vanilla Ice hit, and the dancing videos were ultimately responsible for what followed: the hundreds of letters, the thousands of emails, the 5.8 million Facebook fans. The unauthorized redneck-rap tribute song selling on iTunes. The obscene put-downs. The death threats.

Adalia knew she was different. She could see she was bald. She was aware how small she wa—at 14 pounds, she weighed less than Marcelo, and he wa one year old, a baby still, really. Unlike Mommy or Daddy or Gama, she didn't have eyebrows or eyelashes. Other children sometimes mistook her for a boy, even though she was usually outfitted in pink. She needed help walking up a staircase. She couldn't go outside alone to play. She couldn't go to school. At the mall, people looked at her funny. Her parents explained it's "because they've never seen an angel."

Adalia knew that her difference had a diagnosis, progeria, a condition affecting approximately one child in four million. What she didn't know was how progeria ends: The average lifespan is 13 years. At six, there was a distinct possibility she was almost halfway through her short life. Natalia and Ryan refused to talk about that. They focused on the present, not the future.

Among the many messages of support for Adalia and her awe-inspiring bravery and pluck, the page also attracted more than its fair share of unbelievably cruel and horrible comments — “Kill it before it lays eggs,” read one comment; ‘This is the reason abortion should be legal” read another.

Then a number of Facebook groups sprung up with the sole purpose of taunting the little girl — with names like: “Adalia Rose is a veiny testicle head”; “Adalia Rose should have been aborted”; “Adalia Rose is responsible for 9/11″ and “Adalia Rose is a veiny testicle head.”

Just as sickening where the comments, including: “I can’t take Adalia Rose seriously, she looks like dobby the house elf” — “Whats the difference between Adalia and a watermelon… One is fun to hit with a sledge hammer, and ones a watermelon” — “If Adalia Rose is beautiful then my ballsack must be a model.”

This is just a slight glimpse of the true character of people in our world. As for the beautiful little 6-year-old girl, who was born with a rare premature aging condition, battling an unfathomable, vicious and venomous online bullying campaign, including anonymous death threats, Adalia Rose is now dead.