This Sunday will serve as a sad reminder of last Easter, when 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. was shot to death in a murder posted to Facebook.
The killer, Steve Stephens, was a mental health worker who snapped after a breakup and chose Godwin at random.
The video, which Stephens took on his phone and then uploaded, was seen on Facebook for more than 2 hours before the company took it down.
People living along East 93rd Street where it happened believe the victim could have easily been them.
“Five minutes [before] I was outside when he got killed. I was next door over my neighbor’s house,” said Vickie Driscoll, who heard the gunshot. “It could have been any one of us.”
The tragedy also underscored a sad new reality of crime in the age of social media, prompting Facebook to promise change.
“We have a lot of work and we will keep doing all we can to prevent tragedies like this from happening,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Yet tragedies have continued, with other deaths still posted and subsequently publicized.
This year, Godwin’s survivors sued Facebook for failing to stop his murder, suggesting Stephens could have been flagged when he began sharing murderous thoughts prior to the killing.
“If I go to the Cavs game to see Lebron play, Facebook is able to tell that I’m at Quicken Loans Arena. But they’re not able to tell that there’s a murder that happened in the middle of the street in Cleveland?” their attorney, Shaun Whitehead, asked. “That’s absurd and we want to fix that.”
Facebook has said it will add 3,000 people to help police content, with a focus on hate speech and child exploitation.
Vicki Driscoll says she now keeps a candle in her window, just across from where Godwin died, and often thinks about that fateful Easter Sunday.
“I just did it for a light for him,” she said.