The police involved in a hostage situation were faced with an interesting decision.
It wasn't whether to send
in a robot or storm into a building, it was whether to have the hostage
taker's Facebook page shut down.
Here's what they knew: A
22-year-old man in Pittsburgh had taken another man hostage and was
holed up in a suite on the 16th floor of a high-rise office building.
And the suspect, Klein Michael Thaxton, had been on Facebook for hours.
"People were sending
Facebook messages. We could see that he was paying more attention to
Facebook than to the negotiating team, which was hampering our abilities
to resolve the situation," Diane Richard, a spokeswoman for Pittsburgh
Police Department, said about Friday's incident.
Richard said SWAT
officers kept an eye on the Facebook page for at least two hours before
making a joint decision with the district attorney to ask for the page
to be shut down.
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