Should they have waited?

[Surianne]

I agree with everyone who said it was just a horrible situation.  The friends who posted it were just trying to deal with their brief and remember their friend, and they couldn't have known.

[JonGirl]

I think the etiquette should be (but it isn't well established yet) that if you're not a "next of kin," you don't mention someone's death in an impersonal place.

it's not  your role to "announce" it.

That said, if you hear by phone, and you go to his Facebook page and it's already on there, you would probably think it was safe.

But you shouldn't ever be first with someone else's news--good or bad.

This.

[loner]

I think the etiquette should be (but it isn't well established yet) that if you're not a "next of kin," you don't mention someone's death in an impersonal place.

it's not  your role to "announce" it.

That said, if you hear by phone, and you go to his Facebook page and it's already on there, you would probably think it was safe.

But you shouldn't ever be first with someone else's news--good or bad.

I agree with this.
I wouldn't pass judgement on the kids because they are young and I have never read a story like this before.  But I would be very upset if a friend of one of my family members posted about their death on facebook before I knew.  Especially if they knew me enough to have me as a friend as well.  I would hope they would give me a call to relay the story.  But I do understand this would be hard too.
What a horrible situation.  

[DianeRN]

The police might have been waiting to get a family member to come identify the boy. Does anyone remember the horrible tragedy a few years back when five girls were killed and a friend helped with the identifications instead of family? Several weeks later it was discovered that there had been a mistake and one girl who had been identified as the deceased girl and one who had been identified and severely injured had been misidentified as each other. It was written about by the families in "Mistaken Identity".

[TootsNYC]

The police might have been waiting to get a family member to come identify the boy. Does anyone remember the horrible tragedy a few years back when five girls were killed and a friend helped with the identifications instead of family? Several weeks later it was discovered that there had been a mistake and one girl who had been identified as the deceased girl and one who had been identified and severely injured had been misidentified as each other. It was written about by the families in "Mistaken Identity".

Yes, but it was morning already, and nobody had contacted his parents yet. Not even to ASK them.

That's why I was wondering if they were waiting until morning, figuring "why disturb the parents at 4am," and the speed of Facebook just snuck up on them.

I hadn't heard that the positive ID was given by a friend--I thought the families had identified the girls. They had certainly been sitting by the injured girl's bedside.

[DianeRN]

From a report about the girls : The Grant County, Ind., coroner said that the accident scene had been strewn with purses, and that students had identified the survivor as VanRyn. No scientific testing was conducted to verify the identities. "I can't stress enough that we did everything we knew to do under those circumstances, and trusted the same processes and the same policies that we always do," Coroner Ron Mowery said in an Associated Press report. "This tragedy unfolded like we could never have imagined."

In a posting soon after the crash, Lisa VanRyn, Laura VanRyn's sister, said her sister suffered broken bones, cuts and bruises and facial swelling.

For more than four weeks, VanRyn's family apparently had no doubts their patient was Laura."

They didn't discover the truth until Whitney awoke and began to speak. Even then, they wrote off inconsistencies to confusion from head trauma for almost two more weeks.

Sorry, I don't mean to threadjack, just responding to Toots.

[ilovemykitty40]

In Australia, the identification of a deceased person can only be done by a relative. The article doesn't go into full details (and rightly so) but there are quite a few ways in which the police may have been delayed:

1. They couldn't contact the family - it may be that the family had recently moved and the police had difficulty finding updated contact details and any number of similar scenarios (such as where the next of kin listed on licence details is incorrect). My grandfather, a policeman in the same state as this accident, told me telling relatives was the worst part of his job and if he had to do it at 3am, so be it. I don't think it should be suggested that they were letting the family sleep.

2. The first focus in these situations is to save lives. We don't know, and won't ever know, whether a number of hours passed while emergency services were busy trying to save the occupants of the car, get them out of the wreckage, set up road blocks etc. In particular, their priority is to work on those who still have a pulse and their priority is to get them in ambulances before they move on to retrieving bodies. It sounds callous, but it is a necessity. Even if they knew who was left in the wreckage, they cannot go & knock on a family's door on the say so of the occupants next car. What if they had stopped and changed passengers, dropped someone off etc?

3. Accident sites are very traumatic places and we should consider ourselves lucky that we aren't the ones who have to see them. It is quite possible that the officers who attended the site at 3am were too overcome at it all and they needed to call in new officers to tell the parents. I don't think an officer on the verge of a breakdown is ideal for telling the families.

The NSW Police Force is a finite unit. In the past 5 weeks, there have been multiple fatal car crashes involving Provisional drivers that were the result of sheer stupidity (high speed, DUI) and it is likely that these poor people have had to attend to a number of the crashes. Most of them involved full cars in which 3-5 young lives were lost. I don't think we should be judging the hard working police officers whose job it becomes to clean up the mess. They are doing the best they can and are following rules that were put into place for a very good reason.

As for the facebook etiquette, I can't really judge them. This seems to be the result of a generation who live their lives online so it is hard for us to expect them to react differently when they experience something as devastating as this. The etiquette is poor but when celebrities live their lives on twitter, the ones idolising them will follow. You or I may grieve privately & let the family do the same until it is the right time to approach them, but online networking is the dominant communicative force in today's society. Maybe this is something that parents & schools need to work together to address in sensitive situations such as these.

This is a horrible thing but I don't think any blame should be attributed to the police or the young people shattered by their loss. My sympathies are with the families.

As for what we here in Australia do to stop these kids needlessly killing themselves ... well, I just don't know.

[Slartibartfast]

From my own experience in high school (pre-Facebook, but not by much!), we had a teacher who was in a fairly serious accident.  EVERYONE knew that he had been driving drunk and ran into a tree and died.  Except, of course, he hadn't - he was in the hospital for a few weeks, but he ended up fine.  (Well, as far as the students knew - he may have had some longer-term injuries, but nothing that was obvious to us.)  And the "drunk driving" story was a complete myth - no alcohol was involved in the crash.  But in the high school grapevine, even before Facebook, the urge to tell Big News was just SO strong that people passed on all sorts of rumors about horrible things that had happened to people, even when the details were 100% wrong.

I wonder whether, at the scene, the police asked the friends who the deceased were - and then had to do a bunch of verification on that information, because they didn't know whether it was correct or not.  The friends, on the other hand, could post it straight to Facebook.  I'd rather have the police wait a few hours than have them mistakenly inform a parent their child is dead.

[TootsNYC]

As for what we here in Australia do to stop these kids needlessly killing themselves ... well, I just don't know.

Us Americans don't really know what to do to stop our kids from needlessly killing themselves, either.

[pierrotlunaire0]

The thought did occur to me as a PP mentioned above: the police may have been busy trying to save the lives of everyone they could.  Perhaps the boy wasn't killed immediately.

But his friends saw a horrific accident and leapt to a conclusion.  And as Slarti (hope you don't mind the nickname  ) said, rumors and gossip flew about, aided in our times by Facebook.

I think it is a sad and unfortunate situation, but I can't really fault the police or even the teens who let their upset and grief spill out.  I think Toots' suggestion of having the etiquette be to let the family make the announcement is a good one.  An evolving model of etiquette.

[familyfun]

I agree it was awful for everyone.  The friends probably didn't realize that the family didn't know.  And it's horrible they found out that way.

In addition to the excellent points made about the police by Ilovemykitty, re: the girls, they had multiple non-life threatening injuries.  Just because the injuries were non-life threatening doesn't mean that their memories and ability to express themselves were intact.  Many concussions aren't life threatening but can interfere with memory.  When I was a kid, a neighbor fell while playing with my brother and sustained a mild concussion.  He couldn't remember the events leading up to the fall and kept knocking on our door to ask my brother what had happened.  My parents realized he didn't remember either the events or asking my brother about it, so after the 2nd time he knocked on the door, they asked his parents to take him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with the concussion.

They may have been unconscious, they may have had to be sedated to be treated.  Also, just the emotional shock of being in an accident with fatalities can affect memory and the ability to give information.  And not to be morbid or gruesome, but fatal accidents can sometimes result in victims not being recognizable.  Burns, swelling, etc. can render someone unrecognizable.    Also, it's possible that even if the driver was drinking, some of the passengers may have been.   It didn't happen often, but occasionally, in my younger years, one of us would get so drunk we had to go home.  If that was the case (not saying it was), they may not remember who they were in the car with, etc.  I'm not excusing getting that drunk, just saying it could be a reason why.

As for the friends in the other car, maybe they were drag racing or something which shouldn't have been going on in the car was going on.   Again, they should have stopped, but that may be why they kept going and didn't go right to the police.

[blarg314]

I don't necessarily think anything wrong was done by the police - a multiple victim accident can be pretty messy to sort out, and as others have said, in a triage situation, the priority is on the people who are injured but still alive. And the police have a higher standard for identification and notification than friends do, and the hospital has official policies for declaring someone dead.  They have to be sure who and what they have, not almost sure. And then they have to get the correct contact information (and between cell phones and unlisted phone numbers, that's not necessarily trivial). If the police phoned up some parents to say that their son had died, and it turned out it was actually a different kid but they had phoned before it was definitely verified, they'd be in even worse hot water.

As far as the kids go, what they did was very thoughtless, but understandable. They are concentrating on the fact that their friend has just died, and Facebook is a big part of their lives. Plus, teens don't generally have a whole lot of experience with what happens when someone dies.

Etiquette hasn't quite caught up with the speed of information technology, and I suspect no one has mentioned to them that they shouldn't post notices of someone's death on their Facebook page until a suitable amount of time for extended (not just immediate) family to be notified.

[USC1972]

Also, in defense of the police, I would add that extricating victims from car wrecks frequently takes upward of two hours.  It is common that accident victims don't die on-scene, but shortly after in transport or at the hospital.  At least in the US, hospitals are ranked partly based on the level of traumatic injuries they accept, so patients aren't always taken to their community facility.  We routinely get patients flown in from rural areas, over an hour away by air.

It could easily be that it took two hours to get him out of the car, and two hours for the local police to drive to the hospital where he was taken.  Then another hour once they were there to deal with an unfamiliar place at three in the morning, and to locate a patient who might be registered as Doe, John #7820501 and remembered by the staff just as, "one of the kids from an MVA last night."  That's five hours just to track him down, forget identifying someone who, between the scene and the hospital had all his clothes and personal effects removed, and then get back in touch with their local department so that they can begin to locate next of kin.

I know this wasn't exactly the point of this thread, and I am happy to see that many others have made similar arguments, but working in an ER, I find that most people base their ideas of hospitals off TV shows, which are accurate only in that they are also set in a building with "Hospital" on the front.  TV shows neatly wrap of several cases in 42 minutes, all while saving time for someone to have sex in a closet, seated group meals in quaint locations, and a hug from their new patient friend.  In reality, 42 minutes might not even get a patient stabilized much less through surgery, there is no unoccupied place to have sex, you can eat if it fits in your pocket, and that patient was much more likely to bite you.

That said, it should occur to all of the kids at the accident scene, who are the only ones to know at three in the morning, that maybe the victims' other friends and relatives don't need to find out on facebook.  If they are genuinely too traumatized to consider this, I cannot imagine posting on facebook is their first impulse.  To me, it sounds like a case of the I-knew-firsts, which is always crass, and in this case very inconsiderate.

[RainhaDoTexugo]

If they are genuinely too traumatized to consider this, I cannot imagine posting on facebook is their first impulse.  To me, it sounds like a case of the I-knew-firsts, which is always crass, and in this case very inconsiderate.

I really don't think that's fair to the kids.  Facebook is most likely a major form of communication for them.  It's not just some fun thing on the side like it is for a lot of adults.  It seems natural to me that you'd share sad news in the same way that your group shares any other news.  Now, as uninvolved adults looking in, we can say that it wasn't the best choice, and I won't argue with that, but I think it's much more likely that they were looking for a way to find comfort and honor their friend that fit into their personal subculture, than to attribute gloating motives to them.  It's entirely possible to make a mistake with no ill intentions.

[Slartibartfast]

Unfortunately, I have just gotten a firsthand look at this, as there was a (nationally publicized, I believe) shooting at the college just down the street from me yesterday.  Two or three dead and two or three injured - the shooter was an instructor who had been denied tenure and she shot several of her colleagues.  We had a choir concert scheduled for last night with a community group, but our director also teaches at the college and several of the choir members are students there.  The whole campus was a madhouse, and in fact nobody even bothered to let their building's chair know they were out of "lockdown" until another faculty member saw it mentioned on the news and called in to the head of the department.  The victims' names were released on Twitter before the police said anything official.  I think it's really unfortunate that it happens that way, but it's just the nature of how we pass and process information nowadays.

(None of the people associated with our choir were involved in the incident, although a few had taken classes from the shooter and the injured faculty.  Really, as an "outsider" in that kind of situation, what do you do?)