Your immediate reaction might be that this is some teen who needed more Tictok subscribers or something and was willing to go to crazy ends in order to make that happen but that is not the case here. The person in question is nearly 40 years old proving that his insane need for attention extends well beyond the teens in today's world.
Maggie Sweeney of North Carolina is 37 years old and hails from Franklin, North Carolina. Not long ago she was reported missing by some unknown entity and not long after an anonymous source reported that she had been murdered to both a friend as well as the Department of Social Services. How this was conducted has not been released to the public.
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The thing is that Maggie was found the next day, very much not murdered. She is currently being charged with several things that are all based about filing a false report and one of them is a more serious crime of "false report of death or serious injury by telephonic communication and obstructing law enforcement officers."
I understand that there are people out there with serious mental issues, this has always been the case. However, I think that social media and this crazy need that people have for online attention could be driving things like this. Perhaps she had recently seen "Gone Girl" and thought she would try to pull of the same thing. There doesn't appear to be any money or other reasons involved in this story though, Maggie has not said why she did this but of course the information spread very quickly to friends and family, who were all very distraught and concerned. I can only imagine that misery that my own family would go through if they were to not be able to find me and then get word that I had been murdered. I think about the personal anguish that I would go through even if this was to happen to one of my dogs.
Maggie has been quite tight-lipped about all of this but as of now she is famous for the wrong reasons and I hope she gets in serious trouble for this. We can't have this become a trend among people and I would imagine that there are already other instances of exactly this sort of thing happening. In fact last month someone attempted to make themselves famous when they claimed that she had been attempting to assist a toddler on the side of the road when she was kidnapped only to 2 days later emerge back home claiming that she had escaped her captors. Upon being pressed by police to help identify those that kidnapped her she eventually caved and admitted that she made the whole thing up.
Was this another person that desperately needs attention from strangers online?
Maybe it is because I am older and social media has never really been a part of my life but I have never really understood the allure of having the attention of strangers online. I think these people need to accept that they are not going to be celebrities and to just accept their small circle of friends and run with that. Is it really so bad to not have millions of followers on Instagram? Do we really need this in our lives in order to be happy?
In the meantime if you say hello to a stranger you run the risk of seeming like a creep or weirdo, but we can do basically anything online and the crazier the better, right?
It isn't just a question of the mental trauma that you put your friends and family through but also the fact that police resources are being diverted to your "very serious" case even though it never even happened. In the meantime certain parts of the country are very dangerous due to lack of police and here we have some starved for attention folks out there that are wasting the little resources we have on pursuing something that doesn't even exist.
I hope that both of these cases are treated very seriously by authorities and suspect they will be. An example needs to be made before this sort of crap becomes the next TicTok challenge of stupidity.
My question for both of these women is what was the end game here? This is especially true for the girl that attempted to fake her own murder: Were you just going to get another identity? This isn't a movie lady, things like that can't just be done.
Just for the record I have no idea if either of these people were doing this for social media credit, that is just my assumption. Even if it wasn't for that - which I doubt - it is an exceptionally stupid thing to do.
As far as the North Carolina incidence is concerned it is worth noting that Franklin, where she lives, is in the Western part of the state and those of us that live in the Eastern part of the state already think those folks are a bit wonky.