Here is an interesting article about friends of a young murder victim who used TikTok to find justice for their friend and find the murderer.
The article addresses overworked police departments and what is essentially victim-blaming in the case of female victims. Cases that lose steam and fall by the wayside. Why, indeed, should people have to go to social media and blogs to try to put pressure on a police department to solve murder cases?
Often, those searching for someone else have at least one thing in common: grief, maybe, but also a general mistrust of the criminal-justice system, a sense that they have been failed or abandoned by police and prosecutors and journalists, that crowdsourced vigilantism is the only avenue for justice.
A Murder Solved in DMs
When Daisy De La O was killed, friends looked to social media for the man they suspected had done it. They found him.
Imagine if your family member was a victim in a case where there is a 45-year history of the heaviest of ass-covering going on by prosecutors and state police? That is the OCCK case. Try moving those two agencies to do the right thing. We were failed and abandoned by police, prosecutors, journalists and a community that was all too eager to find a reason to look the other way and never demanded answers. We are still owed answers about the crimes themselves and the cover up that further damaged not only victims’ families, but entire communities. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and blogs cannot capture the depravity of public officials who buried this case, let alone the depravity of the killers of four kids. We know what you did. You know you will never have to answer for it.