I began blogging in 2004. This is an article I published way back on August 8, 2007, a year before I began writing about true crime. What’s interesting about it is that the old saying remains the same — some things never change. The name of the blogger I critiqued does not matter today. We had become very good blogging friends and he was responsible for my initial move from Blogger to WordPress, back in the day when WordPress was by invitation only. Today, my site is on the Squarespace platform, but my original “Marinade Dave” Blogger and WordPress ones are still up and running. Mostly, I use them to link articles here.
In any event, as time went on, I noticed more and more disturbing things about my friend. He embellished an awful lot. So much, so, that I slowly started to distrust him. How could someone so obscure be so famous when no one knows who he is, I wondered? Every claim to fame emanated from his blog and nowhere else. Eventually, I developed a very sour attitude and we had a falling out. The article that finally did it — the final straw — is explained in the post below. I removed the title because there’s no point in drawing attention to him; good or bad. This is exactly how I wrote it over 5 years ago. However, I did make minor word changes, mostly grammatical.
I was intrigued when I read a blogger’s post titled, [EDITED] about two distinct shootings that occurred on opposite sides of the Atlantic, one in Far Rockaway, Queens, NY, and the other in Fulham, a suburban area of West London, England. As I familiarized myself with the story, I found some discrepancies in his version and what actually transpired, and I believe it to be a distortion of the truth. In it, he represented himself as a friend of the Queens victim. How sad that a person would accept offers of sympathy from his unsuspecting audience [blog commenters] over the death of this friend in light of the facts I will relate here. I looked into the Far Rockaway shooting as he described it and found nothing. I talked to professionals working the field, including a detective at the (NYPD) 101st Precinct. I went to news wires and feeds. I tried search engines.
What caught my attention was evident from the start, that he and the victim were friends and the victim had just arrived from Haiti to live the American dream. The blogger didn’t strike me as a person who’s spent much time on that island nation. How did he cultivate this friendship? How did they meet? Queens is not in New Jersey’s back yard, where the blogger is based and works out of his apartment. Neither is Haiti. Something just didn’t click.
Interestingly, with all of the murders in NYC, I was case specific in my query. Rightfully so. I asked about a Haitian immigrant who was shot in the collarbone, based on the blogger’s description of “his friend’s” senseless murder as he sat in a second-floor. The bullet that struck his collarbone careened into the heart, killing him instantly. In reality, the unfortunate gentleman who met his demise in the news account was not a “recent immigrant from Haiti” at all, nor was he shot in the collarbone, unless it somehow worked its way from the eye to the collarbone to the heart. The victim had been living here for years and was from Guyana, not exactly within swimming distance of Haiti. Certainly, he should have known where this “friend” was originally from and how long he’d been here. I kept thinking it’s not the same shooting, they’re not related, but there was no other incident and his story crumbled.
Was this an unprofessional attempt to elicit sympathy for the overall message of his post calling for a worldwide ban on handguns? If so, he should have done more homework and gotten his facts straight. Although weapons of this nature are legal to buy in America, most used in the commission of crimes are not purchased by the book and ‘Saturday Night Specials’ are next to impossible to trace. So are the bullets. He tied this shooting to one in London. Britain has some of the most restrictive laws in the world that make it virtually impossible to legitimately purchase firearms, which means that both crimes were more than likely committed with illegal guns. The attempt to tie the two together was feeble at best, and because of a lack of solid information based on facts, it diluted the focus of the message. He used a falsehood as the pretext to further his own questionable agenda. But was it about the evils of handguns or a cry for sympathy over the loss of a friend?
In the realm of non-fiction writing, in this case what I would consider to be more of an op-ed opinion piece than a news report, authors must not stray from the truth. Embellishment and personal gain are words that should not be part of the vocabulary. The world is filled with distortions and with the tools we have readily available today, all reports of news events will be put under microscopes somewhere, sometime, by someone. Bloggers, especially of this genre, are no different from any other journalist and it’s only a matter of time before a watchdog group scrutinizes and exposes what is recorded as true. Until then, readers beware.
Although I did not know him, my sympathies go to the friends and family of the deceased, Urtez Burnett, and none for the imagination of the author of that post, who was only happy to accept sympathy.
Here is a link to the account of the Far Rockaway incident: Bullet Kills 22-Year-Old As He Looks Out Window
If you or anyone you know has information on this, please call CRIMESTOPPERS at 1-877-577-TIPS or the 101st Precinct Detective Squad at 718-868-3428.
This is an opinion piece about one blog and should be interpreted as such.