By
Niraj Chokshi July 21, 2017
New
York Times
The video was shocking in Florida, where
shocking videos seem like a genre. A group of teenagers laughed and watched as
a man struggled in the water of a pond. The man drowned, and his body was not
found for days.
The five teenagers did nothing to help him,
not even call 911, but after examining the video, the authorities said this
week that they did not break the law.
“In the state of Florida, there is no law in
place that requires a person to render aid or call to render aid to a victim in
distress,” Yvonne Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department, said
on Friday.
But the local police were not giving up.
Later in the day, they said that they believed a different Florida law requires any person who is aware of a death to report it. Ms.
Martinez said the authorities would recommend charges under that law.
The man, Jamel Dunn, 31, drowned July 9, and
his body was found five days later when the police received a report that it
was floating near the edge of the pond in a park in Cocoa, a town with 18,000
people near Orlando.
As
detectives investigated the death over the weekend, a family member of Mr.
Dunn’s alerted them to the video, which the teenagers had begun sharing with
friends.
The police asked the office of Phil Archer,
the state attorney for Brevard and Seminole Counties, to review the footage.
But the prosecutor’s office said it did not contain the evidence needed for a
criminal prosecution.
In the statement, the prosecutor’s office
said it was nonetheless “deeply saddened and shocked” by how Mr. Dunn died and
the failure of the teenagers to help him in any way.
The low-quality, 2.5-minute cellphone video
was provided to The New York Times by Mr. Archer’s office and earlier obtained
by Florida Today. It shows a man flailing in the middle of a body of water as
the teenagers describe his struggle and laugh at him from the shore. The
teenagers are not visible.
One of the them, using an expletive, calls
Mr. Dunn a junkie. Someone tells him not to expect any assistance: “Ain’t
nobody going to help you, you dumb bitch. You shouldn’t have got in there,” he
says.
About a minute into the video, the man
appears to let out a whimper before submerging, fully, underwater. “He just
died!” a voice can be heard saying, as the others begin to laugh.
Later, one of the teenagers appears to
suggest that they call the police, only to be rejected by another.
The police identified and met with all five,
who ranged in age from 14 to 18, Ms. Martinez said. None appeared to show much
emotion. “What I saw was not remorseful,” she said.
A Facebook user named Simone Scott, who
identified herself online as Mr. Dunn’s sister, expressed frustration with the
investigation and said that “something should be done” in a video live-streamed
on the social network on Thursday. A funeral service will be held a week from
Saturday, Ms. Scott said on Facebook. She did not respond to a request for an
interview.
“If they can sit there and watch somebody die
in front of their eyes, imagine what they’re going to do when they get older?”
she said about the teenagers.
She expressed frustration with the
investigation and said she wondered how Mr. Dunn, who she said was disabled and
walked with a cane, ended up in the middle of the pond.
Surveillance footage obtained Thursday from a
neighbor showed that Mr. Dunn entered the pond on his own and did not appear to
be coerced or forced to go in, Ms. Martinez said.
Although the teenagers cannot be charged for
failing to help Mr. Dunn, town officials said later Friday that they would ask
the prosecutor to consider charges under the law requiring that a death be
reported.
“While this in no way will bring justice for
what occurred, it is a start,” Henry Parrish III, the mayor of Cocoa, said in a
statement. “I know that everyone working on this investigation has been
tireless in their efforts to find answers.”
Naika’s
death was a spectator sport
Naika
Venant’s smile belied her pain and depression.
By
LEONARD PITTS JR.
January
27, 2017
lpitts@miamiherald.com
A few thoughts on the lonely death of Naika
Venant.
As you may have heard, Naika, a
Her self-destruction drew attention, all
right, but surely not the kind she wanted. To read the report by The Miami
Herald’s Carol Marbin Miller and Alex Harris is to cringe with disgust:
“A thousand people watched for nearly an hour
as Naika Venant prepared to kill herself. They kept watching for another hour
as the 14-year-old dangled on her scarf from the shower door in the bathroom of
her
“People mocked the young girl, called her
names and reacted to the video with Facebook’s laughing emoji, said Antonio
Gethers, one of her 4,500 Facebook friends. Others posted cruel parody videos
pretending to hang themselves, too.”
The bleak despair and dead-end hope that
cause people to take their lives is, unfortunately, all too familiar. And those
feelings can be magnified dangerously in adolescence., an age where all
emotions are outsized, all passions urgent and raw. Factor in that she was a
survivor of physical abuse and sexual assault, and it becomes depressingly easy
to imagine the forces that drove Naika to destroy herself.
It is less easy to understand why that act
was received the way it was.
The harsh laughter and cold ridicule of
“people” — the word is used advisedly — who watched Naika’s suicide suggest
that we flatter ourselves when we call ourselves a higher species. Apparently,
only one individual tried to help; a friend saw the live feed and called
police, but inadvertently sent them to the wrong address. By the time it got
sorted out, Naika was beyond saving.
Miami-Dade schools chief Alberto Carvalho
blames Facebook for what happened, which is as understandable as it is
misguided. Might as well blame the sidewalk where Kitty Genovese was killed in
1964 as she screamed for help that didn’t come,. Or the
Facebook is an easy target, but it is not the
web service whose behavior is appalling here. It is, rather, the ordinary
people, the everyday Janes and Joes who could have acted to save this child,
but did not. One is mindful of what’s called “the bystander effect,” which,
according to Psychology Today, “occurs when the presence of others hinders an
individual from intervening in an emergency situation.”
But that doesn’t explain the laughter. It
does not make sense of the mocking derision of a troubled child.
No, that behavior speaks to moral stupidity,
to the objectification of other people and their pain, to a selfish inability
to extend compassion beyond the barricades of one’s own life. All of which have
come to feel far too commonplace. It cries out for families, worship houses and
schools to rededicate themselves to teaching what it means to be a truly human
being. That would be a good way to give meaning to this tragedy.
It’s haunting to think Naika might have
killed herself on Facebook hoping to be seen.
Yes, an audience watched her die. Then they
clicked their browsers to see what else was on.
Editor’s note
This column quotes an Jan. 26 article by
Carol Marbin Miller and Alex Harris that stated that a thousand people watched
on Facebook Live for nearly an hour as Naika Venant, a 14-year-old foster
child, live-streamed preparations to hang herself in the bathroom of a
It has since been learned that the actual
number is not clear. The original figure was based on the “views” logged on the
site as reported by multiple people who watched the video before it was taken
down by Facebook. One thousand views may mean 1,000 individuals or it may mean
significantly fewer people, with some returning several times. Moreover, it is
not clear that each “view” represented someone staying with the video to the
point at which she took her own life.
Six people who said they viewed the video
told the Herald that cruel comments were posted, with some posts suggesting the
hanging was a hoax. The comments, like the video, are no longer viewable on
Facebook Live.
Read more at: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article129303609.
html#storylink=cpy