Family Needs the Help of Young Trendfollowers
By Shannon in News on Dec 23, 2006 8:00PM
Up in the Great White North, a murder took place in a nightclub parking lot on Nov. 17. 22-year-old Ryan Milner was stabbed to death in Hamilton, Ontario, after a Sean Price hip-hop concert. Surveillance video from the club was checked out by local police, who were apparently at a loss. They then considered the demographic of the concert attendees and the fact that the assailant appeared to be a younger man. Their next move? They put the surveillance tape up on YouTube. 34,000 hits and worldwide recognition later, Milner's killer turned himself in. Now that's peer pressure.
On a par with our northern neighbors, the family of slain Chicago dermatologist Dr. David Cornbleet have taken to the next generation of information sharing. As you may remember, Cornbleet was murdered by an unidentified perpetrator inside his Michigan Ave. office on Oct. 24. With the help of ubiquitous surveillance cameras, police have determined the suspect is roughly between 18 and 25, right up the YouTube/MySpace alley. To that end, a friend of the family, the late Cornbleet's daughter's boyfriend, has created a MySpace page dedicated to finding out who killed the much-beloved doctor. (It even looks as if our original story concerning the murder and subsequent tape is listed as one of their news links, for which we are honored.) They're hoping that since a numerous amount of young people don't typically pay attention to mainstream media, a possible friend or acquaintence of the murderer stands a better chance of stumbling across the story on MySpace.
Of note is the fact that there's no YouTube video of the tape in question. Would Chicago police be as willing as their Hamilton counterparts to reach out to the younger set? The Cornbleets have several screengrabs off the video, but nothing beats the real thing. Still, MySpace might be enough on its own. We'll be very interested to see if this concept works. In the immortal words of Marge Simpson, "As long as everybody's videotaping everybody else, justice will be done."