Police in Madrid and Fort Lauderdale were notified, launching investigations on each side of the Atlantic.
Ana Maria Knezevic traveled from South Florida to Spain in December to get away for a while. Her family and friends say the naturalized American originally from Colombia has been going through a nasty divorce from her Serbian husband, but the trip was also a chance to explore new places.
Then, she vanished — two weeks ago, shortly after a man wearing a motorcycle helmet disabled the security cameras at her Madrid apartment building by spray painting the lenses. The next day, two friends received separate text messages — one in English, one in Spanish — from the 40-year-old’s phone saying she was running off for a few days with a man she had just met.
“She wouldn’t do this … it is very unsafe and crazy behavior. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do that,” said Sanna Rameau, the friend who got the English text. It was written, she said, in an emotionless style that wasn’t Ana’s. The Spanish message was so flat it appeared to have been written in English and run through Google Translate, she said.
Agreed, people are largely horrible.
I enjoyed your paragraph above, regarding the morbid fascination, and I feel I share it.
The waves of hate against all things not white, male, cis/het show up just like Twitter.
Humanity is struggling to adapt to disingenuous trolls in ways that include having people in charge of “moderation” without any desire to foster sincere communication.
Whether it is intentional or not, ignoring fallacies and other red flags used by trolls has only enabled them further and the greatest adaptation of the foreseeable Information Age will be An Effective Bullshit Filter.