Mother told son was dead via Facebook message from Police

An Atlanta, Georgian Police department resorted to Facebook to inform a mother that her missing son was dead

By Genna Patterson

Giving a family member the terrible news that a loved one has died is difficult enough in person or over the phone, but a Georgian Police Department chose use Facebook instead.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that a mother, Anna Lamb-Creasy was contacted via Facebook to ask her to call them to find out her son, Rickie had been killed in a car accident. Not only that, but it took her a month to see the message as it was sent from an account named “Misty Hancock” and not the Georgian Police Department.

According to the Atlanta Journal, “Anna Lamb-Creasey told Channel 2's Tom Jones she had no idea that if someone who is not a ‘friend’ sends her a message, it goes to a box called ‘other’ in the message folder.”

After a month of looking for her son, Anna came across the message in her ‘other’ folder, despite having posted messages on her son’s facebook wall asking if anyone had seen him. The message was from “Misty Hancock” and her daughter received the same message. The account for “Misty’ had a photo of rapper TI, so at first they ignored it thinking it was fake.

Anna called hospitals, jails and eventually tried the number listed on the “misty” page only to discover on February 14 that her son had been hit by a car crossing the road nearly a month since she had been looking for him.

Anna is livid that police couldn’t use conventional methods to find her. She said; “They told me that they did the best that they can do. But I'm not sure about that. (Because) if they can track a criminal down, they couldn't track me down? They could have done better… I've been on my job 13 years. They could have found me."

Anna also doesn't understand why the police sent her the message from the “Misty” page and not the Police department profile. The Clayton County Police Department maintains that they tried to contact Anna in every other conventional way trying multiple addresses but could never reach anyone. The Police said they are looking into what account was used to post the message and why. While this is a tragic tale we're just wondering, if her son was missing for 20 days, why didn't she call the police in the first place to report his disappearance.