Online Reporter
SAN FRANCISCO. − On its surface, Facebook Live was meant to empower users to share life’s special moments with family and friends in real time.
But the social media site’s live streaming feature is increasingly becoming a theatre for grim realities and crime as it happens.
In the last few years the world has seen some horrific videos, including an Easter morning shooting of a man outside a Houston gas station in the United States.
Cassandra Damper, who was initially charged with tampering with evidence in the shooting police called accidental, was charged with aggravated assault with reckless serious bodily injury in the shooting of Devyn Holmes.
As scary and heartbreaking as some of these videos are, Facebook users somehow just can’t look away and this is just a tip of the iceberg of the horror the world has been exposed to.
74-YEAR-OLD MAN MURDERED IN A FACEBOOK VIDEO
One year before Devyn Holmes’ shooting, Facebook users saw a horrific video of a man’s murder in Ohio, United States. Robert Godwin Sr was killed when Steve Stephens shot the 74-year-old man at point-blank range.
The shooter, who was apparently upset after a recent break-up, was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his car after leading police on a chase in Pennsylvania.
INFANT GIRL KILLED ON FACEBOOK LIVE BEFORE DAD TURNED GUN ON HIMSELF
A 20-year-old man in Thailand, who was upset with his wife, hanged their 11-month-old daughter in an abandoned hotel before killing himself – and it was all streamed on Facebook Live.
PHILANDO CASTILE’S KILLING ON FACEBOOK LIVE
Diamond Reynolds was left grief-stricken after a Minnesota police officer shot and killed her boyfriend during a July 6, 2016 traffic stop.
Reynolds took out her cellphone and started live-streaming on Facebook after the shooting.
The video, which was briefly removed from Facebook but later republished with a warning of graphic content shows Reynolds sitting in a car with Castile, whose shirt appears soaked in blood, calmly saying an officer shot her boyfriend.
The officer who shot Philando was acquitted in June 2017. The man’s family reached a US$3 million settlement in his death.
ARMED SUSPECT WHO SHOT AT POLICE ON FACEBOOK LIVE
A man in California live streamed himself firing at deputies during an intense April 2017 standoff in California.
Sean Vasquez, 20, recorded himself loading a gun and then firing shots at officers after they responded to reports of someone firing upon morning commuters in the city of Covina.
At one point Vasquez ran into a nearby home amd barricaded himself inside. He was eventually taken into custody.
MAN WHO STREAMED HIS OWN MURDER OUTSIDE A POLICE STATION ON FACEBOOK LIVE
A 55-year-old North Carolina man who went to complain to police after a family member stole his cell phone ended up filming his own murder. Douglar Colson, 65, was charged after he was caught in a confrontation on camera with the man right before gunshots rang out. − Eyewitness News
Mathew Masinge