Reply to Chilton, posted by TamF1399.
[The driver] is effing weird, i mean dangerous. 1 time after cheerleader practice he was hanging out outside our locker room, like he was trying to look inside and get pictures on his phone. I go up to him and I’m like, what’re you doing here and he looks at me like he was going to kill me. He’s a total fr33k. i know a girl who goes to [deleted] with us and she told me [the driver] grabbed her boobs, only she’s afraid to say anything because she thinks he’ll come get her or start shooting people, like in Virginia Tech.
Reply to Chilton, posted by BoardtoDeath.
i heard somebody who knows a dude was at the party that night and he saw [the driver] before he got in the car and he was walking around all [deleted] up. And that’s why they crashed. It was the POLICE lost the breathaliser results and it was embarrassing, so they had to let him go. And that’s WORD.
Reply to Chilton, posted by SarafromCarmel.
I don’t think it’s fair what everybody in this thread is saying. We don’t know the facts. The crash was a terrible tragedy and the police didn’t press charges, so we have to go with that. Think what [the driver]’s going through. He was in my chemistry class and he never bothered anybody. He was pretty smart and helped our Table Team a lot. I’ll bet he feels real bad about those girls. He’s got to live with that for the rest of his life. I feel sorry for him.
Reply to SarafromCarmel, posted by Anonymous.
Sara U R a lame [deleted]. if he was driving the car then he DID something that made those girls die. How can you say he didn’t? Jesus its people like you who let hitler gas the jews and bush go into Iraq. why dont you call [the driver] up and have him take you for a nice ride? i’ll come put a cross at your [deleted]ing grave, you [deleted].
Reply to Chilton, posted by Legend666.
[The driver]’s brother is retarded and it might look bad for the police to arrest [the driver], cause of all this political correct stuff which makes me sick. Also they should check out the girls purses, I mean the girls in the crash, because I heard he ripped them off before the ambulances got there. His families so poor that they can’t even afford a washer and drier. I’ve seen him and his mom and his [deleted]-up little brother at the laundromat on Billings all the time. Who goes to laundromats? Lusers that’s who.
Reply to Chilton, posted by SexyGurl362.
My best friend is a junior at [deleted] with [the driver] and she was talking to somebody who was at the party where the girls who died were. [The driver] was sitting in a corner with his sweats hood up staring at everybody and talking to himself and somebody found him in the kitchen just looking at the knives. Everybody was like, what the hells he doing here? Why did he come?
Reply to Chilton, posted by Jake42.
U totally OWN it, Chilton!! Yeah [the driver] [deleted]ed up. Look at the luser, his life is epic FAIL!!! He’s always faking he’s sick in PE class to get out of working out. He only goes to the gym to hang around in the locker room and stare at everybody’s [deleted]. He is totally gay, somebody told me that.
Reply to Chilton, posted by CurlyJen.
Me and my friends were talking and last week somebody saw [the driver] on Lighthouse doing donuts in a car he stole from his grandmother without permission. He was trying to get [deleted] to show her thong. (like she’d care, LOL!!!). And when she ignored him he started wacking off right in front of her, right there on Lighthouse at the same time he was driving. he definitely was doing the same thing that night he crashed.
Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.
I go to [deleted], I’m a sophomore, and I know him and everybody knows about him. IMHO, I mean, he’s all right. He games a lot, but so what? I play soccer a lot, that doesn’t make me a killer.
Reply to Anonymous, posted by BillVan.
[Deleted] you, [deleted]. if you know so much whats your sauce oh genius? You don’t even have the balls to post under your real name. Afraid he’d come and [deleted] you up the [deleted]?
Reply to Chilton, posted by BellaKelley.
u r so right!!! Me and my friend were at that party on the 9th where it happened and [the driver] was coming on to [deleted] and they were like, just go away. But he didn’t, he followed them out the door when they were leaving. But we have ourselves to blame too for not doing anything, all of us who were there. We all knew [the driver] is a luser and perv and we should have called the police or somebody when they left. I had this bad feeling like in Ghost Whisperer. And look what happened.
Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.
Somebody goes into Columbine or Virginia Tech with a gun and they’re criminals but when [the driver] kills somebody with a car nobody does anything about it. Something is very messed up here.
Reply to Chilton, posted by WizardOne.
I think we need a time out. Some poster dissed [the driver] because he didn’t like sports and he played games. What’s the BFD? There are millions of people who don’t play sports but like games. I don’t know [the driver] real good but we’re in the same class at [deleted]. He isn’t a bad dude at all. Everybody’s dissing him but does anybody here actually KNOW him? Whatever happened, he didn’t hurt anybody on purpose and we all know people who do, everyday. IMHO, he feels bad about what happened. The police didn’t arrest him because, duh, he didn’t do anything illegal.
Reply to WizardOne, posted by Halfpipe22.
Another gamer-lamer. Look at the name. L00ZR!!! FOAD wizard!
Reply to Chilton, posted by Archenemy.
[The driver] is a total phr33k. In his locker at school, he has pictures of the d00ds from Columbine and Virginia Tech, and those dead bodies from the concentration camps. He walks around in some ch33p ass hoodie trying to look kewl but hes a luser on roids, thats all he’ll ever be.
[The driver] if your reading this, d00d, and not hanging with the elves and fairies, remember: we OWN U. Why don’t you U just do us all a favor and blow you’re [deleted]ing brains out. Your death = EPIC WIN!
Chapter 9
KATHRYN DANCE SAT back, shaking her head. “A lot of hormones there,” she said to Jon Boling.
She was troubled by the viciousness of the blog posts—and most of them written by young people.
Boling scrolled back to the original post. “Look what happened. Chilton makes a simple observation about a fatal accident. All he does is question whether the road was safely maintained. But look at how the responding posts arc. They go from discussing what Chilton brought up—highway safety—then move on to government finances and then to the kid who was driving, even though he apparently didn’t do anything wrong. The posters get more and more agitated as they attack him and finally the blog turns into a barroom brawl among the posters themselves.”
“Like the game of Telephone. By the time the message moves along, it’s distorted. ‘I heard . . .’ ‘Somebody knows somebody who . . .’ ‘A friend of mine told me . . .’ ” She scanned the pages again. “One thing I noticed, Chilton doesn’t fight back. Look at the post about Reverend Fisk and the right-to-life group.”
Reply to Chilton, posted by CrimsoninChrist.
You are a sinner who cannot comprehend the goodness within the heart of Rev. R. Samuel Fisk. He has devoted his life to Christ and all of His works, while you do nothing but pander to the masses for your own pleasure and profit. Your misreading of the great Reverend’s views is pathetic and libelous. You should be nailed up on a cross yourself.
Boling told her, “No, the serious bloggers don’t argue back. Chilton will give a reasoned response, but flame wars—attacks among posters—get out of control and become personal. The postings become about the attack, not the substance of the topic. That’s one of the problems with blogs. In person, people would never feud like this. The anonymity of the blogs means the fights go on for days or weeks.”
Dance looked through the text. “So the boy is a student.” She recalled her deduction from the interview with Tammy Foster. “Chilton deleted his name and the name of
the school but it’s got to be Robert Louis Stevenson. Where Tammy goes.”
Boling tapped the screen. “And there’s her post. She was one of the first to say something about the boy. And everyone else jumped on board after that.”
Maybe the post was the source of the guilt Dance had picked up on during the interview. If this boy was behind the attack, then Tammy, as Dance and O’Neil had speculated, would feel partly responsible for the assault on her; she’d brought it on herself. And perhaps guilty too if he went on to hurt someone else. This explained why Tammy wouldn’t like the suggestion that her abductor had a bike in the car: that would lead Dance to consider a younger suspect—a student whose identity the girl didn’t want to reveal because she still considered him a threat.
“It’s all so vicious,” Dance said, nodding at the screen.
“Did you hear about the Litter Boy?”
“Who?”
“Happened in Kyoto a few years ago. Japan. A teenage boy tossed a fast food wrapper and soda cup on the ground in a park. Somebody shot a picture of the kid doing it on their cell phone and uploaded it to his friends. Next thing, it started appearing on blogs and social networking sites all over the country. Cybervigilantes tracked him down. They got his name and address and posted the info online. It spread to thousands of blogs. The whole thing became a witch hunt. People began showing up at his house—throwing trash in the yard. He nearly killed himself—that kind of dishonor is significant in Japan.” Boling’s tonal quality and body language revealed anger. “Critics say, oh, it’s just words or pictures. But they can be weapons too. They can cause just as much damage as fists. And, frankly, I think the scars last longer.”
Dance said, “I don’t get some of the vocabulary in the posts.”
He laughed. “Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it’s in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. ‘Sauce’ for ‘source.’ ‘Moar’ for ‘more.’ ‘IMHO’ is ‘in my humble opinion.’”
“Do I dare ask? ‘FOAD.’ ”
“Oh,” he said, “a polite valediction to your note. It means ‘Fuck off and die.’ All caps, of course, is the same as shouting.”
“And what is ‘p-h-r-3-3-k’?”
“That’s leetspeak for ‘freak.’ ”
“Leetspeak?”
“It’s a sort of language that’s been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from ‘elite,’ as in the best and the chicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who’s mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English.”
“Why do kids use it?”
“Because it’s creative and unconventional . . . and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell ‘K-E-W-L.’ ”
“The spelling and grammar are awful.”
“True, but it doesn’t mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It’s just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you’re saying, you can be as careless as you want.”
Dance said, “I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to.”
“Oh, I’ll find it. The online world is huge but it’s also small. I’ve got Tammy’s social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It’s bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It’s got a hundred thirty million members.”
“A hundred thirty million?”
“Yep. Bigger than most countries.” Boling was squinting as he typed. “Okay, I’m in her account, just do a little cross-referencing. . . . There. Got him.”
“That fast?”
“Yep. His name’s Travis Brigham. You’re right. He’s a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson High in Monterey. Going to be a senior this fall. Lives in Pacific Grove.”
Where Dance and her children lived.
“I’m looking over some of the postings in OurWorld about the accident. Looks like he was driving a car back from a party and lost control. Two girls were killed, another one ended up in the hospital. He wasn’t badly injured. No charges were filed—there was some question about the condition of the road. It’d been raining.”
“That! Sure. I remember it.” Parents always recall fatal car crashes involving youngsters. And, of course, she felt a sting of memory from several years ago: the highway patrol officer calling her at home, asking if she was FBI Agent Bill Swenson’s wife. Why was he asking? she’d wondered.
I’m sorry to tell you, Agent Dance . . . I’m afraid there’s been an accident.
She now pushed the thought away and said, “Innocent but he’s still getting vilified.”
“But innocence is boring,” Boling said wryly. “It’s no fun to post about that.” He indicated the blog. “What you’ve got here are Vengeful Angels.”
“What’s that?”
“A category of cyberbullies. Vengeful Angels are vigilantes. They’re attacking Travis because they think he got away with something—since he wasn’t arrested after the accident. They don’t believe, or trust, the police. Another category is the Power Hungry—they’re closest to typical school yard bullies. They need to control others by pushing them around. Then there are the Mean Girls. They bully because, well, they’re little shits. Girls, mostly, who’re bored and post cruel things for the fun of it. It borders on sadism.” A tinge of anger again in Boling’s voice. “Bullying . . . it’s a real problem. And it’s getting worse. The latest statistics are that thirty-five percent of kids have been bullied or threatened online, most of them multiple times.” He fell silent and his eyes narrowed.
“What, Jon?”
“Interesting that there’s one thing we don’t- see.”
“What’s that?”
“Travis fighting back in the blog, flaming the people who attacked him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”
Boling gave a thin laugh. “Oh, believe me, he would’ve known about the attacks five minutes after the first post in the Chilton thread.”
“Why’s it significant he’s not posting?”
“One of the most persistent categories of cyberbullying is called Revenge of the Nerds, or the Victims of Retaliators. Those are people who’ve been bullied and are fighting back. The social stigma of being outed or bullied or humiliated at that age is overwhelming. I guarantee he’s furious and he’s hurt and he wants to get even. Those feelings have to come out somehow. You get the implication?”
Dance understood. “It suggests that he is the one who attacked Tammy.”
“If he’s not going after them online, it’s all the more likely he’d be inclined to get them in real life.” A troubled glance at the screen. “Ariel, BellaKelley, SexyGurl362, Legend666, Archenemy—they all posted attacks on him. Which means they’re all at risk—if he’s the one.”
“Would it be hard for him to get their names and addresses?”
“Some, sure, short of hacking into routers and servers. The ‘Anonymous’ postings, of course. But a lot of them would be as easy to find as my getting his name. All he’d need would be a few high school yearbooks or class directories, access to OurWorld, Facebook or MySpace. Oh, and everybody’s favorite—Google.”
Dance noted a shadow had fallen over them and Jonathan Boling was looking past her.
Michael O’Neil stepped into the office. Dance was relieved to see him. They shared smiles. The professor stood. Dance introduced them. The two men shook hands.
Boling said, “So, I have you to thank for my first outing as a cop.”
“If ‘thank’ is the right word,” O’Neil said with a wry smile.
They all sat at the coffee table, and Dance told the deputy what they’d found . . . and what they suspected: that Tammy might have been attacked because she’d posted a comment on a blog about a high school student who’d been responsible for a car crash.
“Was that the accident on One a couple of weeks
ago? About five miles south of Carmel?”
“Right.”
Boling said, “The boy’s name is Travis Brigham and he’s a student at Robert Louis Stevenson, where the victims went.”
“So he’s a person of interest, at least. And it’s possible—what we were afraid of?” O’Neil asked Dance. “He wants to keep going?”
“Very likely. Cyberbullying pushes people over the edge. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times.”
O’Neil put his feet on the coffee table and rocked back in the chair. Two years ago she’d bet him ten dollars that someday he’d fall over backward. So far she had yet to collect. He asked Dance, “Anything more on witnesses?”
Dance explained that TJ hadn’t reported back yet about the security camera near the highway where the first cross had been left, nor had Rey responded about witnesses near the club where Tammy had been abducted.
O’Neil said that there hadn’t been any breakthroughs with the physical evidence. “Only one thing—Crime Scene found a gray fiber, cotton, on the cross.” He added that the lab in Salinas couldn’t match it to a specific database, other than to report that it was probably from clothing, not from carpet or furniture.
“That’s all, nothing else? No prints, tread marks?”
O’Neil shrugged. “The perp’s either very smart or very lucky.”
Dance walked to her desk and went into the state databases of warrants and records. She squinted over the screen and read, “Travis Alan Brigham, age seventeen. Driver’s license puts him at four oh eight Henderson Road.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose as she read. “Interesting. He’s got a record.” Then she shook her head. “No, sorry. My mistake. It’s not him. It’s Samuel Brigham, at the same address. He’s fifteen. Juvie record. Arrested twice on peeping, once on misdemeanor assault. Both dismissed, subject to psych treatment. Looks like he’s a brother. But Travis? No, he’s clean.”
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 8