
MNT- Yesterday afternoon, Fort Lauderdale resident Esteban Marcelo Guzman-Santiago got off work and noticed that about a hundred comments had poured onto a Facebook video he had posted from an awards ceremony.
“Is this the guy???” someone wrote. Chimed in another, “I’d be a killer to (sic) if I had a face that looked like that.”
Guzman-Santiago, 23, quickly realized that he had the misfortune of sharing a name with the man who opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in a rampage that killed five and injured eight yesterday. That, coupled with the fact he lives in Fort Lauderdale, apparently led internet sleuths to think they’d found their guy.
“Your a peice of shit I hope u burn to death,” a West Virginia man told Guzman-Santiago in a message .
In the comments on Guzman-Santiago’s video, others debated whether they’d truly found the culprit. Maybe this Esteban wasn’t the right size. Plus, the video, posted about an hour after the shooting, didn’t look like it was filmed in an airport.
“Yall FB a name and think yall solved the crime,” one woman wrote.
In fact, the true shooter had been apprehended almost immediately after the shooting, Broward Sheriff Scott Israel said during a news conference. By the time Guzman-Santiago left work around 5:30 p.m., the gunman had been in custody for several hours.
That didn’t stop the armchair detectives from forming an Internet mob, though. As Guzman-Santiago drove home from the call center where he works, his phone rang, and it was someone asking if he was the shooter. He’d had enough.
“Listen, everybody who is messaging me, texting me, calling me, asking me am I this motherfucking shooter,” he said in a Facebook Live video, “I just left from work. I just got through from graduating from the training program. How in the goddamn fuck am I the goddamn shooter?”
He added that if he was the shooter, “I wouldn’t be responding to your motherfucking comments any motherfucking way.”
Classic. We’ve hit that point in the world where normal names aren’t good enough anymore. Gotta follow suit like the celebrities and name your kid something crazy or else they might get confused with some other domestic terrorist. It’s like when Elaine started dating another Joel Rifkin and had her co worker and Giants fans in an uproar when they thought she was dating a domestic terrorist. You’re just begging for trouble if you associate the same name. The worst part though are some of the comments coming through. I’m sure I would be pretty pissed off when people are accusing me of a major atrocity and issuing death threats to me, but I could at least look on the bright side and know my Klout score went through the roof. Social media buzz in this day and age is worth it’s weight in gold if you can manipulate it. But it must of been a real kick in the dick when all these people are accusing the innocent Esteban because “his face looked like that.” Or people wondering if that was him because of his body size. Like accusing someone of being a mass murderer is one thing. A person can easily shrug that off considering he would know if he was in fact a murderer, but he also definitely probably knows if he’s a fat guy and if he’s ugly or not. Such a shame. It’s probably gonna stick with him for awhile so he might as well go with a different name for a few years. Just don’t go with a name like Ned or Todd. Ned is the type of guy who buys irregular underwear, and you’ll never meet a normal Todd, that’s like asking to be accused of being a killer again.