What Would You Do If...

Tweet

Okay.. as we all know, the internet can be a great source of information! A place to learn, a place to share.... and as we all know, it can be a place to openly confess our trysts, secret love affairs,... A place to confess anything. And.. a place to lie about anything. Rewind about a few years. When I lived in another state, two women who lived less than 11 miles away came up missing. There were a few leads, many areas searched, but if any leads arose from those.. They weren't made public. So this year is the anniversary of the disappearance of one of the women, and the local newspaper ran a story about it. The newspaper has an open forum where readers can respond to stories. There were two somewhat questionable comments left in response to the story. One involved involved finding a set of bones at a specific location near a wooded area. The person finding them claims to not know the origin of the bones (animal or otherwise) and also claims to have phoned the police, but states that the police never came. Having lived in that area previously myself, policing failing to respond to a call does NOT surprise me. However, I now live in another state 800 miles away. This post however, is alarming. It could be false, it could be true. It started to eat me alive. I phoned the police dept in that state and got a bloody farking recording to call city police, 9-1-1, or call back on Monday. It's not really a 9-1-1 situation, and I refuse to deal with that city's police. I called my local police department to get advice on who exactly I need to contact right away before those forum posts were deleted. Finally, I called the police department in the city where one of the women had gone missing from. Despite the fact that the post had been there for nearly 4 hours, that police dept claims that I was the first one to point it out! That bystander effect thought really upset me and I called my mother who proceeded to tell me that it was probably a hoax and I shouldn't have called the police department there, or in my own town because now they'll think that I'm crazy and won't take future calls from me seriously. I think she's saying that because it was a claim made on the internet, and she has a tendency to not believe anything anyone says online unless it's a family member or a conservative Christian news/website. In the past, she has belittled me for making friends or pen pals online. Her saying that REALLY upset me. The story probably isn't true, but I don't think that I could live with my conscience if years from now I discovered it was true, and I had been another person caught in the bystander effect, assuming that the person making the claim or any other readers had reported it. People lie on the internet all the time, but people post all sorts of incriminating videos and written stuff just as much. Does anyone think that I did the right thing in calling the police and bringing this to their attention.. or does anyone here think that I am crazy and deserved the ridicule that my mother handed to me?