PSA: If Someone Doesn't Accept Your Friend Request, Do Not Threaten To Kill Them And Kick In Their Front Door
from the with-friends-like-these dept
We've all been there. You jump on some social media platform having met someone in this existence that passes for real life and fire off a friend request to them. And then you... wait. Sometimes you then wait some more. And then, sometimes, you're left in this terrifying, self-absorbed limbo, having tried to make this connection only to see it never accepted. Your mind races. Why didn't they accept my request? Do they not like me? Is it something I said? I know, you think, I'll just threaten to murder them and go break down their front door!
Wait, what? Well, that appears to be exactly the way that one North Dakota man chose to end his 2020 after a co-worker didn't accept his Facebook friend request.
Caleb Burczyk, 29, pleaded not guilty to felony charges of burglary and terrorizing filed in Williams County District Court Tuesday, Dec. 29. Burczyk’s attorney Jeff Nehring declined to comment on the case.
Police say Burczyk started sending aggressive Facebook messages to his ex-coworker on Dec. 24, according to an affidavit of probable cause. He threatened his ex-coworker’s life and warned him that he was going to “come at” him if he did not accept his Facebook friend request, the affidavit stated.
“Accept my friend request or I’m going to murder you,” Burczyk wrote in a message to his ex-coworker, according to the affidavit.
An addendum PSA: the best way to convince someone to accept your social media connection is probably not to explicitly threaten them with murder if they don't. On top of landing you in legal hot water, most of us just don't want to associate ourselves with folks who threaten to kill us.
Regardless, law enforcement reports that Burczyk proceeded to go to his ex-coworkers home, where there was a security camera, and kicked in the front door. He was arrested afterwards, of course. Given the mountain of physical evidence at hand, it feels like a certainty that he's not going to be found innocent, assuming any of this actually gets to a trial decision.
So stay even, Techdirt friends. A rebuffed social media connection request is nothing to go to jail over.
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Filed Under: caleb burczyk, friending, jeff nehring, social media
Companies: facebook
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Ring
.01 points for Ring
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Interstate Commerce
And then the Feds step in and charge him with federal crimes because he used the internet to convey his message.
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While the friend request / Ring? (article is paywalled, but it's mentioned by another commenter) connections are what gets it written about here, I wonder what the actual underlying issues were. Without the modern tech angle, this seems possible to be a story of workplace harassment that spilled into the outside world when they left the company, but it would be fascinating to see what was actually happening without people obsessing over the method he chose to try and stalk his victim after they left. I'm sure this a story that happened many times every year before Facebook existed.
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Re:
Article link worked for me.
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Re:
"One member of an interpersonal relationship breaks off contact, and the other is enraged by this" seems pretty uninteresting, actually. I mean, wasn't that a plot point in nearly every "Cops" episode?
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People have done this with every method of communication since forever, yeah.
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With friends like that...
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Respect in interpersonal https://showbox.run/ relationships means honoring and valuing other people even if you do not agree with their views or actions.
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This means that you can say “No” to people https://dltutuapp.com/tutuapp-download/ who ask you for something without feeling guilty or mean.
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