In a bizarre incident at Tennessee, a couple were murdered in their home simply because they Facebook unfriended somebody.
Reuters recently reported that Billy Clay Payne Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth of Mountain City, Tenn., paid dearly with their lives when they deleted Jenelle Potter, the daughter of one of the primary suspects, from their Facebook friends list in January 2012.
Marvin Enoch “Buddy” Potter Jr., the father of Jenelle, and another man namedJamie Lynn Curd were arrested on Tuesday and were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Bond was set at $750,000 for each count of murder.
Both of the victims were shot in the head, and Hayworth was apparently holding their 8-month old baby in her arms when the gruesome murders were done. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, unharmed, when the bodies were discovered on January 31.
Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece was appalled with the incident saying,
We’ve had murders, but nothing like this. This is just senseless. Reece said it’s the worst thing he had ever seen in his 27 years in the service.
Reece also said that Jenelle Potter lives with her parents and is a Facebook addict. He said his office received complaints from her parents whenever Jenelle wasblocked from social network accounts of other Facebook users.
The Huffington Post dug up a history of harrassment and threats of violence by Jenelle Potter and her parents, against Internet friends who block or delete her in their Facebook accounts.
Jenelle had a harrassment charge filed against her in court in May 2011 by Lindsay Thomas. Two women sought restraining orders against Potter in separate instances, one in August 2010 and another in May 2011.
Reece told HuffPost:
If you deleted her, they (Potter and her parents) started harassing you. If you ran into them in the grocery store, you had an altercation with them. It was an ongoing thing with these people.
There were no charges filed against 30-year old Jenelle Potter in the double murder. Preliminary hearing for her father, Buddy, will be in March.
This is not the first case of violence arising from mostly trivial spats on the world’sbiggest social networking site. Reuters reported that last year, a woman in Iowa was accused of setting fire to a garage of a friend who had Facebook unfriendedher.
In Texas, a man reportedly hit his wife when she failed to like a post he wrote on Facebook about the death anniversary of his mother.
Last July 2011, 17 year-old Tyler Hadley of Florida hammered both his parents to death and then hosted a party in their home with 40 Facebook friends in attendance. Some of those who attended the party claimed that Hadley killed his parents because they were opposed to holding the event.
These incidents serve as a warning that interactions in social networking sites should not be taken lightly. With millions of subscribers visiting the sites daily, one is more than likely to encounter individuals with different and probably unpredictable personalities and behaviors.
Social networking sites enable us to find new friends and connect with old buddies. But these sites are also fertile grounds for stalkers, perverts, scammers, and mean-spirited individuals.
Word fights and lengthy argumentative comments may be healthy once in a while, but if it leads to libel, harrassment, stalking, suicide, and murder, you better think twice what you say or do in the social arenas of cyberspace.
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