3 victims of a gangland murder have ties and leave ghostly memories on myspace.
Varo, 22, was dead – shot in the head as he sat at his computer. Varo's friend Darren Christian, 28, and one of Christian's friends, 21-year-old Lindy Cochran, had also been killed in the same gangland style.
Daniel Varo, known for fixing cars and spending many hours online was found shot to death right next to his computer. It was as if he had just fallen off the chair in front of the computer that he spent so many hours on. There was a single bullet wound to the head. Darren Christian was found in the living room with his ID and a single piece of paper on his back. He also had a single gunshot wound to the head in a very simliar fashion to the one that killed his friend Daniel. Lyndy Cochran was found almost perpendicular to Darren's body and she too was killed by a single shot to her head.
Pepsi bottles, noodle-soup containers, and PlayStation controllers lay on the table beside them. Christian's safe was gone.
This is a very in depth look into the internet, a social scene and a murder that played out in real life and online. After the smoke had cleared and the funerals were finished, the Myspace pages of the three victims recieved almost daily, messages from their friends and family reaching out to them.
It went this way for months. Varo's circle (of friends) kept leaving messages on his page as if he were still replacing engines and dancing silly at raves.
"Darren and Daniel put so much of themselves into those pages – 'This is who I am, this is the music I like, these are my friends' – that it's like a little piece of them is still here,"Deanne Bays, Daniel's sister explains. "That's how we talked, anyway, the last few months. I'm just picking up where we left off."
"People distance themselves," says Charles Figley, head of Florida State University's Traumatology Institute. "The ties that bind people – births, marriages – split apart because of a catastrophe."
On social network sites, those sides interact. Victims' buddies can howl at killers' cousins, and the cousins can scream back. "All the old social relationship models and theories don't apply anymore," Figley adds. "We're rewriting textbooks here."
