
Published: Nov 28, 06
Views: 2,924
With a community of over 120 million members, MySpace cannot escape criminals and violence. In fact, there are a number of murders and violent crimes which police are tracking back to interactions between members in the MySpace community. There’s even a ‘ghoulish’ web site called MyDeathSpace which chronicals over 600 victims of murders with MySpace profiles.
A year after Virginia Commonwealth University freshman Taylor Behl was found murdered in September 2005, friends were still posting messages to her page saying how much they missed her. Ryan Dallas Cook's crew still write him notes about their trips to Vegas and Disneyland; he died in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident in October 2005.
Other social networks are quickly piling up their own tragedies and online afterlives. Classmates of 23-year-old Jason Shephard, strangled to death in September, share memories and pictures on Facebook, as do friends of John and Kevin Frazza, whose father shot them to death and then killed himself in July.
Law enforcement authorities across the country turn to MySpace for help with roughly 150 criminal probes a month. In the Varo case, police spent hours on the victims' MySpace pages. All those comments and pictures posted from the Sixth and South Union PC gave officers a map of the victims' interconnected social landscape. On February 9, two days after the murders, detectives asked MySpace to freeze the accounts of everyone involved to help in "determining possible suspects as well as assist in determining the time frame for the crime."
(wired)
References: wired
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