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Monday, June 8, 2009

News Classifieds of the Damned

Posted by Dan Savage on Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 6:35 AM

Craig can't catch a break:

A pregnant 21-year-old found dead with her baby no longer in her womb befriended the woman charged with killing her through Craigslist, her mother said Sunday.

Comments (13) RSS

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So if you meet someone at Smith, talk, leave Smith, and then that person kills you, did they kill you through Smith?

Posted by Mr. Poe on June 8, 2009 at 6:57 AM

Why stop with Craigslist? How about Hotmail, Gmail? How about the internet? Hell, how about WORDS?

Posted by Gloria on June 8, 2009 at 7:36 AM

Pretty much everything involved save the brain of the murderer is to blame. Even the fetus.

Posted by Mr. Poe on June 8, 2009 at 7:38 AM

I love the line "killing her through Criagslist". Am I the only guy thinking a knife reached out from her computer screen and started stabbing her?

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger on June 8, 2009 at 8:10 AM

This story has happened before. The only difference is that ... wait, there's no difference.

Does Craigslist really make it easier for predatory people to make contact with trusting victims? Really? Or has it just become such a great way to meet people (whether friends, vendors, clients or customers) that we now see a number of those relationships going bad?

Posted by STJA on June 8, 2009 at 9:00 AM

In other news, the social interaction roulette killer strikes again, this time picking up a girl in a bar. What will be next, telephone, internet personals site, grocery store? Details about what ubiquitous fixture of society you should avoid next at 11.

Posted by cpt. tim on June 8, 2009 at 9:00 AM

@4: That's some Ghost in the Machine shit right there.

Posted by Greg on June 8, 2009 at 9:04 AM

Ted Bundy met his victims around UW campus. We need to shut down the UW campus because it is a tool for serial killers.

Posted by Greg on June 8, 2009 at 10:34 AM

The headline of that article sucks. Why didn't they write "Pregnant woman killed" instead of the crappy, passive-voice "Woman who was pregnant is killed?"

Posted by Urgutha Forka on June 8, 2009 at 10:46 AM

Holy convoluted lede, batman! Can't blame him for the headline though — that was almost certainly written by an editor. Hell, the first two grafs might have made some kind of sense prior to editing, who knows.

Posted by Lauren on June 8, 2009 at 10:53 AM

@5: Yes, Craigslist makes it easier for predatory people to make contact with victims. To deny that is to be willfully blind.

That doesn't mean there's anything we should (or even could) do about it.

Posted by bigyaz on June 8, 2009 at 11:07 AM

@5: Yes, this happened before (several [10-12] years ago) in Ohio.

The only difference is that Craigslist wasn't involved.

Chances are this crime would have happened with or without Craigslist (or other Internet resource) - since we've seen these same crimes in the past when there was (little to) no Internet around to facilitate these crimes.

Bad people will do bad things for bad reasons, period. The tools they use to accomplish their goals may change, but the actions are theirs as is how they use/abuse those tools.

Posted by Hyzenthlayk9

on June 8, 2009 at 2:16 PM

@1 and @4, read the whole sentence. It says she befriended the woman through craigslist. The "who is charged with killing her" is a modifier of the woman that she befriended through craigslist. Clumsy sentence, but it says that she met the woman through craigslist, not that the woman killed her through craigslist.

Posted by vitaminwater on June 11, 2009 at 3:45 PM