Woman Uses Facebook to Track Down Attacker
Social media not only can be a force for good — sometimes it’s a force for justice.
London’s Telegraph.co.uk reports on a British woman, Jennifer Wilson, who used Facebook to identify another woman who smashed a pint glass in her face in a nightclub, nearly blinding her, and then left the scene.
Police investigating the attack told her CCTV from the club was not clear and evidence had been cleared away from the dance floor by staff.
But Miss Wilson, from Oxhey, Herts., recognised one of (assailant Ashley) Holliman’s friends who she knew vaguely from Facebook.
She trawled the social networking site and searched through 200 of the man’s ‘friends’ until she found a photograph of her attacker.
She even tracked down her address through a mutual friend on the site and gave it to Hertfordshire Police.
Holliman wasn’t home when police arrived to arrest her, so the cops asked Wilson if she could find out where the assault suspect worked. Another quick visit to Facebook and the information was retrieved. Police picked up Holliman the next day at the hairdresser’s where she worked and took her to the station, where Wilson picked her out of a lineup (or, as the Telegraph puts it, “an identity parade”).
Wilson told the Telegraph that while she was happy to have had her assailant caught and punished, she’s not going to be “friending” the local cops any time soon.
“In the end I had to do the police’s job for them and track this girl down on Facebook,” she said.
