By FRANK CERABINO Cox Newspapers ADVERTISING WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — It was a busy week for cautionary tales from the land of Facebook. A 28-year-old Riviera Beach, Fla., woman was sent to jail for intentionally driving her car into
By FRANK CERABINO
Cox Newspapers
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — It was a busy week for cautionary tales from the land of Facebook.
A 28-year-old Riviera Beach, Fla., woman was sent to jail for intentionally driving her car into her 19-year-old male cousin in a fit of anger, according to police.
The episode began with a Facebook posting, police said. Latasha N. Hutchins posted a comment about the cousin’s mother. He was so upset at what she wrote that he threw a brick at her car.
The brick missed, but Hutchins didn’t when she hit him with her car as he tried to run away, police said.
All this could have been avoided without Facebook, a platform to make a virtual fool of yourself 24/7, and without even having to leave home.
Just ask Jacob Jock, 29, of Sarasota, Fla., who also got sent to jail this past week for playing the fool on Facebook.
Jock thought he had discovered a good way to get out of serving as a juror in a personal injury case.
During jury selection, he sent a “friend” request to the defendant in the case, a clear violation of judicial rules that bar contact between jurors and trial participants while the case is ongoing.
The defendant reported the contact after Jock was selected to serve on the jury. And sure enough, he was dismissed from the panel.
Jock went back to his Facebook page to report his triumphant legal maneuver to his nearly 1,300 Facebook friends:
“Score I got dismissed!! apparently they frown upon sending a friend request to the defendant haha.”
Haha. The judge in the case read it, too, and Circuit Judge Nancy Donnellan wasn’t clicking “like” on the comment.
Instead, she summoned Jock back to court.
“I cannot think of a more insidious threat to the erosion of democracy than citizens who do not care,” she told him, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
And she didn’t buy Jock’s explanation that he accidentally sent the friend request to the defendant.
On Thursday, she sentenced Jock to three days in jail.
But the most talked-about Facebook misadventure of the week happened in North Carolina, where a dad found his way around the security settings on his 15-year-old daughter’s Facebook page.
And Tommy Jordan was rewarded for that act of intrusive parenting by the discovery that his teenage daughter resented him, and was tired of doing chores.
The Facebook posting so infuriated the father that he posted a video response on his daughter’s Facebook page:
“This is for my daughter, Hannah, and more importantly, for all her friends on Facebook, who thought her little rebellious post was cute, and for all you parents out there who think your kids don’t post bad things on Facebook, well, I want to read you one.”
After reading her post, and delivering his angry rebuke of his daughter’s view of her life, he takes out his pistol and fires nine bullets into his daughter’s laptop.
Jordan’s Facebook talk-‘n’-shoot to his daughter received tens of millions of YouTube views, and eventually an airing on national TV, where it received a rebuke from Dr. Phil McGraw on NBC’s “Today” show.
“You never, ever humiliate your child publicly,” the psychologist said. “You’re supposed to be the adult, the calm in the middle of the storm, where you say, ‘OK, you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.’ But this consequence was pretty radical.”
Yes, it was a good week for Facebook follies, and proof again that life for some people would be far easier if others could only imagine what was on their minds.
Frank Cerabino writes for The Palm Beach Post. Email him at frank_cerabino@pbpost.com.
