Social media serves an important purpose; it is, for one thing, an excellent way of staying in touch with friends and family. It also gives people a kind of virtual soapbox on which to vent their feelings and frustrations; their dearest held dreams and their darkest fears.
That being said, no one – be they prince or pauper, celebrity or average citizen – has ever truly benefited from a full blown social media meltdown. One needn’t cast their mind too far back into the past to remember famous celebrity Twitter gaffes like Alec Bladwin’s homophobic rant or even pseudo–singer/soft–core pornography starlet Tila Tequila’s bizarre Illuminati tinged conspiracy theories.
One alleged criminal in Florida obviously hasn’t learnt from history however, taking to social media website Facebook to post a series of rambling and increasingly incoherent messages on the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office official page and a wanted photograph of him they had put up there.
23-year-old Matthew Oliver, who was wanted by the Sheriff’s Office in connection with a robbery, basically lost his mind when he saw his own image on July 10th, known in Pasco County as ‘Fugitive Day’.
To place all of Oliver’s rambling messages on here would take up much more space than they are worth, but some of them are definitely worth quoting.
Oliver threatened the Sheriff’s Office according to the Huffington Post, claiming he would “make them pay” for “slandering his name in public” and claimed that he had been set up by a “crack head”.
Oliver claimed to have been in hospital the day he was allegedly involved in the robbery, claiming he’d been cut during an “mma (mixed martial arts) fight” and “nearly died”.
But it wasn’t just the police who copped a serve from Oliver and his vitriolic Facebook posts. He also started fighting with a number of other Facebook users who were taking shots at his photograph, commenting on his rather large ears. Some people also (quite rightly) said that Oliver was almost certainly going to appear on a list of ‘the world’s dumbest criminals’ for commenting on his own wanted photograph.
“Lol, first of all I’m a Mechanical Engineer,” boasted Oliver to the people questioning his obviously towering intellect. “What do you slouches do?”
He also propped up his wounded ego over the barbs about his ears, saying: “And your insults about big ears don’t faze me because I’m better looking that ALL of you lol.”
it would seem that Pasco County Sheriff’s Office got the last ‘lol’ however, arresting Oliver a few days after his braggadocios bout of Facebook posting.
The Sheriff’s Office also released an (understandably) rather amused press release saying that while they had always enjoyed decent levels of success from posting images of wanted people on Facebook, this was the first time a fugitive had actually responded to their post.
ROFL!
Seriously though, what is wrong with the people in Florida? It’s a source of embarrassment, even to people in states like Mississippi and Texas.
Image: Pasco County Sheriff’s Office
