Facebook Friend Delete Leads to Shooting Deaths of Couple
It is eerie when you think how quickly something as innocent as deleting a friend on Facebook can escalate to murder. But it can and it has. In a literal "telling of the facts," a father, disturbed that his adult daughter had been deleted on Facebook by her "former" Tennessee couple friends (photo, above), allegedly shot them both and he is now being charged with murder according to authorities.
The sheriff has called act a "senseless thing." But after investigators do their work and the stories come out, the provocation and development of hatred and fear between the parties will perhaps make more sense. But crime oftentimes involves such complex psychological underpinnings of the actors and victims, perhaps it never can make sense, let alone something as hapless and apparently riling as a delete from Facebook.
In November, another Facebook dispute ended with a man shot in the face and his sister beaten with a baseball bat in San Bernadino County California. As a result of the escalating arguments on Facebook, Jerry Ramirez, 24, and his 21-year-old girlfriend, Catherine Villarreal, drove over to the victims' house armed with a gun and a baseball bat. Words came to blows when the female victim was struck with a bat and the victim's brother attempting to intervene, was shot. Ramirez and Villarreal turned themselves in and were arrested for attempted murder. But no lives were lost.
Unfortunately, it isn't the same in the Mountain City murder case. There was a forewarning of the dispute that lead to the couple's shooting, a disagreement that might not have been considered all that serious. The Payne and Hayworth had notified the police that Marvin Potter's daughter had harassed them after they removed her as a friend on the social networking site. Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece was upfront with this information to the press on Wednesday.
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