Blogger leaves evidence in blog

May 24, 2005 1:24 PM

Murdered blogger's last entry helps find killer(Suspect admits to the deed) Here's his last entry. RIP (via digg)
posted by null terminated (35 comments total)

Wow. Damned eerie reading that entry. That's horrible.
posted by xmutex at 1:26 PM on May 24, 2005

i dunno wut to say ! if u were some other nationality i won't really care dat much cuz people die everyday in new york because of some dumbasses who's out ruin other's life. buh since ur chinese i feel real bad. n u r my friends cousin's friend so rest in peace, heaven is a nice place. i believe everything happens for a reason, maybe god want u n ur sis up dere. the guys who killed u will pay. rest in peace and have great lifes in heaven. n leave all the grief and pain n miseries on earth.

Thanks for the all the effort you put into composing that message, "xxlmfe_oo." I shudder to think what comments you leave for the living.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 1:31 PM on May 24, 2005

that would make the killer a blogicidal maniac, i guess.
posted by quonsar at 1:33 PM on May 24, 2005

from the comments: "dude, you dont have to worry about missing japanese class ever again."
posted by jperkins at 1:36 PM on May 24, 2005

Damn. It's unnerving to think how something as grave as the identity of a murderer can be contained in such day-to-day words. And, sad to see a life being documented and then so immediately, spuriously cut short... RIP, Simon.
posted by Drexen at 1:38 PM on May 24, 2005

.
posted by twiggy at 1:43 PM on May 24, 2005

That does it. I'm starting a blog.
posted by baphomet at 1:58 PM on May 24, 2005

The eerie feeling that reading about this leaves me with is... God, I don't know. There's just something so awful about knowing the kid was typing away at his blog, (naturally) not knowing that he was going to be murdered a short time later. I think it happened that very same day he made that entry... perhaps even minutes later. Ugh. It gives me the shivers. At least the killer is in custody.

This kind of reminds me of the Rachelle Waterman stuff from last fall (at least as far as the internet is concerned... I think her computer and LJ entries provided evidence) where the girl got her ex-boyfriend and some other guy to murder her mother. It looks like the LiveJournal staff has gone in and deleted/disabled all the "YOU MURDERED YOUR MOM" comments that people left, as well as retroactively locked some of the later entries, though.
posted by Kosh at 2:05 PM on May 24, 2005

It's so strange, you know, this guy is about to die and he's fretting about his Japanese classes, working on a paper, etc. Just living his mundane life as if it's going to last much longer then a few more hours...

I wonder, you think if the killer had managed to get back to Hong Kong he ever would have been caught?
posted by delmoi at 2:28 PM on May 24, 2005

When I die, do you guys promise to make a MeFi thread linking back to my online journal's last entry and making fun of it? Thanks. I appreciate it. =) I sure hope my last journal entry has no misspellings or typos. How embarrassing.
posted by ZachsMind at 2:32 PM on May 24, 2005

I'm glad they got the guy, and that he confessed. Off subject: this reminded me that (in America) when you're interrogating someone, it's legal to lie to them i.e: tell them the victim mentioned you in his blog and you're suspect because of it. I think it's terrible practice.
posted by Specklet at 2:34 PM on May 24, 2005

Specklet: I don't mean to be snarky, but have you really thought of what the alternative would entail?

"We think that you killed your girlfriend, Mr. Smith, but we absolutely don't have enough evidence to convict you. Now tell us, did you kill her?"
posted by Doug at 2:43 PM on May 24, 2005

What Kosh and delmoi said about Simon's last blog entry reminded me of this, which I first found when a lover-turned-close friend drowned about two years ago:

"We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance." - Marcel Proust

(BTW, there are just way way too many pages out there that attribute this to the movie Final Destination. Philistines!)
posted by GrammarMoses at 2:57 PM on May 24, 2005

Doug, you mean the alternative where the police actually have to go and collect evidence and prove that you did something? That would be horrible.

This is a terribly sad story. The killer should die for his crime, maybe not the first murder but the second was definitely planned out while he waited for her to come home. What a tragic waste of lives.
posted by fenriq at 3:33 PM on May 24, 2005

.
posted by moonbird at 3:58 PM on May 24, 2005

Doug, you mean the alternative where the police actually have to go and collect evidence and prove that you did something? That would be horrible.
fenriq
No one is suggesting otherwise. The point of the technique is to break down someone's false story, the idea being that if told there is evidence that invalidates his story a suspect will confess. This doesn't mean that there won't be a full investigation. The evidence collected in such an investigation will be used to verify and bolster any information gleaned from an interrogation, like always. So what's wrong with the technique?
posted by Sangermaine at 4:04 PM on May 24, 2005

Nobody was making fun of his entry, unless there were some nasty comments here in this thread that got deleted before I saw them. If you're referring to the quoted stuff, that's from the comments on the entry. The vast majority of those appear to have been placed not by his friends but by random people who dropped in after the story hit the news. Most of them are quietly respectful "RIP"s but there are a few bizarre ones in there, like the "if you weren't chinese i wouldn't care if you had died" one.

The comments that are from his friends or just from people who remember him are particularly heartbreaking.

I wonder if this kind of thing will become more prevalent (people's last moments, expected or not, being documented) as blogs become more and more popular.
posted by Kosh at 4:20 PM on May 24, 2005

Interesting story for those of us who spend too much time on our computers. Glad they caught the guy who appears to have committed the murder. Did anyone else notice that the first linked New York Daily News article looks like it was written by a fifth grader (not the second one, that is fine)? The blog entry is just eerie. RIP Sharon and Simon Lin.
posted by caddis at 4:55 PM on May 24, 2005

Creepy. Cool post.
posted by Smedleyman at 4:57 PM on May 24, 2005

I dunno. It just seems to be such an extreme measure to take to try and get nominated for The Bloggies..
< /bad taste>.
posted by apocalypse miaow at 5:17 PM on May 24, 2005

If I were to snuff it right now, my last blog entry would be some pictures of a big ship. While this may lead fascinated mourners to believe that I was a fan of ships, and I'm not, I think that it would be kind of cool.

I can only pray to escape the eternal embarrassment of having the last record of me on the internets being a quiz in which I reveal to the world what flavor of icecream I would be...
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:43 PM on May 24, 2005

I recall visiting LiveJournals of several people who died (out of morbid curiosity) and being stunned at all of the strangers who wrote things like "HA HA UR DEAD." Maybe people should be required to get a license to use the Internet.
posted by Joey Michaels at 6:10 PM on May 24, 2005

Didn't we have an article in here a while back about cyber-ghosts or cyber-shadows or something? About all the accounts we leave behind when we die?

Anyways, it's not all bad, look at all the eProps he's getting now!
posted by Citizen Premier at 6:46 PM on May 24, 2005

could this be the first time that blogging really made a difference?
posted by 0bvious at 7:17 PM on May 24, 2005

Sorry for the morbidness of the question, but could someone please explain the order of events?

I mean, did he press SUBMIT, then get robbed immediately? Or did the killer leave, then come back later on to rob/kill him? Just curious.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:27 PM on May 24, 2005

Sangermaine: So what's wrong with the technique?

"Your father, they pumped him full of adrenaline and he came out of his coma, and he said that you did it,'" McCready told Marty. "I lied to him," he says, adding that it was OK to do that because "the United States Supreme Court says it is."

Marty begged to take a polygraph, but the detectives refused. Meanwhile, McCready’s scheme worked. Marty began to wonder if he had blacked out, and if he had attacked his parents. Finally, he told the police what they wanted to hear: his confession.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:44 PM on May 24, 2005

Note to self: do not idly wonder about death in blog else Bad Things Happen.
posted by five fresh fish at 7:59 PM on May 24, 2005

How long before this becomes a Law and Order episode?

I give it two months, summer hiatus be damned.
posted by mudpuppie at 9:08 PM on May 24, 2005

Doug, you mean the alternative where the police actually have to go and collect evidence and prove that you did something? That would be horrible.

From reading "Homicide" by David Simon, it seems that homicide clearance rates would drop dramatically if police weren't allowed to lie in order to attempt to extract info from you.
posted by drezdn at 10:02 PM on May 24, 2005

Sorry to hear about your murder. I hope they fry the guy who killed you.

what a terrible shame. i hope you rest in peace.
P.S I hope you weren't a yankees fan cause they're sucking so bad this year.

omg, datz lyk totally s4d, i h0p3 you accepted j3zuz into yo lyf so u go ta h34v3n

I'm going to tell my friends to make sure that the comments facility on my blog is switched off in the even of my death.
posted by chill at 6:22 AM on May 25, 2005

omg, datz lyk totally s4d, i h0p3 you accepted j3zuz into yo lyf so u go ta h34v3n

I am speechless; I thought you were making that up.

Anyone who would post that sort of disrespectful inanity in a dead person's blog should be burned alive.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 6:40 AM on May 25, 2005

Police can lie, lawyers can lie, the only person who can't lie is the supposedly innocent until proven otherwise suspect.
posted by Megafly at 6:51 AM on May 25, 2005

lawyers can lie
No they can't, that's called fraud.

As for suspects, they lie all the time. That is also fraud.
posted by Outlawyr at 8:49 AM on May 25, 2005

It's certainly affecting to read something like that last entry knowing that the person who wrote it was about to be killed, but I don't think we can credit the blog entry with solving the murder.

It was not clear how much time passed before Sharon Ng came home at 9:30 p.m. Cops said Lin pounced on her as she entered the home and stabbed her repeatedly in the neck.

In the minutes after the attack, Sharon Ng's current boyfriend called and she managed to tell him to get help.

So they would have started looking for the murderer pretty quickly, and ex-boyfriends are usually pretty high up on the list of suspects.
posted by anapestic at 12:44 PM on May 25, 2005

I read this the other day - it's so sad. I read a couple of his prior entries and I started crying when he was talking about how excited he was to get to see Revenge of the Sith on the 19th. It's little things like that that always get to me...
posted by shoppingforsanity at 11:14 AM on May 26, 2005