Facebook killer commits suicide
NEW YORK: US “Facebook shooter” Steve Stephens has shot himself after being spotted by police in Pennsylvania.
According to Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams, Pennsylvania State Police received a 911 tip. Stephens’s vehicle was spotted in a McDonald’s parking lot near Erie, approximately 160km east of Cleveland, Ohio.
State police attempted to stop his vehicle and “after a brief pursuit”, Stephens committed suicide, Williams said.
Stephens, 37, had been on the run for nearly 48 hours after filming himself walking up to and shooting dead Robert Godwin, 74, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Stephens did not broadcast the killing on Facebook Live but did post the video to his account, where it remained for three hours. His account was later suspended by Facebook, whose chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said during a conference that the company “will keep doing all of what we can to keep tragedies like this from happening”.
Godwin was walking down a street on Easter Sunday when Stephens pulled up to him and shot him in the head. It appears to have been a random killing.
Reports of Stephens being spotted near Philadelphia on Monday resulted in several schools being put on lockdown. The report turned out to be a false alarm.
CNN reported that Stephens, who worked at a behavioural health agency helping at-risk children, had gone to visit his mother the day before the murder, according to his Facebook video. He reportedly told her that he was suicidal and likely to kill people, but felt he was not taken seriously.
Also on his posted video was a claim that he had killed several other people in addition to Godwin, but police have not found any evidence to verify that claim as yet.
For the time being Facebook relies on its users to flag inappropriate content such as Stephens’s video of him killing Godwin. Zuckerberg said the company would focus on civic engagement more in the future to avoid having “this kind of content” being posted to the site. – The Independent