All screen shots below of death threats and the like are directed at me. They are JPEG images of a few of the roughly 3400 comments that were posted under the same YouTube video. I am the only person who appeared in that video. The comments cover a period of about five years. The YouTube channel owner has often been in contact with police in Hadley, Amherst, the University of Massachusetts, and Chatham MA. None of those departments will communicate with me either at all or in any useful way.
While consistent in sentiment, these vigilante-style comments are not representative of the entire body of comments submitted. Most of the other comments were just plain nasty.
The comments I've selected appeared more or less regularly over the time during which comments were enabled. On or near 10 January 2017, comments were disabled. The exact web address, now private, can be seen in the screen shots.
David E. Sullivan's Northwestern District Attorney's Office (NWDAO) - the jurisdiction of which consists of Hampshire County, Franklin County, and Athol - has known about these comments for years and, in fact, has, practically speaking, defended them.
From NWDAO: "...reports of online misconduct are too numerous to investigate each and every instance in which someone feels harassed or threatened by anonymous posters. In situations such as these, we generally advise people to consider refraining from posting material that others may find objectionable...”
Refrain from posting material that others may find objectionable? Seriously? Like what?
Does Sullivan find objectionable my asking why the Petrit Vasi investigation stopped when, almost to the minute, Maura Murray left town? The same Maura Murray who somehow appears to have avoided arrest by Hadley police for OUI? While she was with a UMass Police cadet who later became a cop? Is that what Sullivan is talking about here?
According to the logic used by Sullivan's NWDAO, they would likewise advise a woman who has been sexually assaulted to stop wearing short skirts.
A lawyer like David E. Sullivan must surely regard logical consistency very highly. I can therefore conclude only that his obvious double-talk is an exception because he is actually defending, without admitting it, the fact that the source of a huge amount of online harassment, including more than one hundred threats to harm or kill me, comes from QAnon / Truther cops within his jurisdiction. Not to mention a unit within his own office.
Almost all the comments are very carefully worded, deliberately so, and hence do not quite constitute, individually, violations of any law. But collectively, their intent is to instill fear. Sullivan knows this is true.
It is an ugly sign of the times that Maura Murray’s disappearance has, with avid help from QAnon-inclined police and private investigators, morphed into a crusade filled mostly with true crime vigilantes.
Yet the hit-and-run of Petrit Vasi, an immigrant from the Balkans, remains almost entirely forgotten despite the fact that Vasi was the obvious victim of a real crime, a true crime. He was very nearly killed. He is crippled for life.
There is, by contrast, no indication that a crime against Maura Murray ever even happened; Maura Murray, a woman whose utterly unknown fate commands cult-like worship while best exemplifying an instance of Missing White Woman Syndrome. This is exactly what energizes people like David E. Sullivan, who, like Burlington MA police chief Michael Kent, tacitly approves of QAnon, an outgrowth of the Truther movement.
Presumably, many in law enforcement throughout western Massachusetts have also known about these comments and the reason behind them. For five whole years.
Please click on any image in order to see a larger version of it.
UPDATE: The YouTube video under which the below comments appeared is, as far as I know, no longer accessible to the public. Perhaps it has been deleted altogether by the channel's owner. However, it has, in effect, been replaced by this video, among many others, complete with a similar, though often less violent, run of comments. But it all reflects the undercurrent of QAnon.
