Two years after Caroline Wimmer was brutally beaten and strangled to death with the cord of a hairdryer, the young woman's parents are launching a multi-pronged legal attack against the ex-EMT who photographed her lifeless body and then posted the picture to Facebook, the apartment building she lived in, the city, Facbook and even the criminal classification of official misconduct.
In 2009, Wimmer was murdered by Calvin Lawson over allegations that she'd told his girlfriend, and mother of his children, on MySpace that he was cheating on her with another woman. She was found by her parents two days later who called the paramedics. One of the first on the scene was the EMT Mark "Moose" Musarella who snapped a picture of Wimmer's corpse on his phone. When he got home he "accidentally" uploaded the image to Facebook, which lead to a firestorm of controversy and the loss of the Musarella's job at the Richmond University Medical Center. (Earlier this month he gave up his EMT license in a plea to avoid jail.)
Wimmer's distraught parents are still livid that pictures of their lost daughter made it online in the first place. "I’m just very upset and traumatized over all this," mother Martha Wimmer said yesterday while announcing the lawsuits—which include one against the apartment building Caroline lived in for not properly securing their property. "I haven’t had a chance to heal yet. This is the second anniversary. We really need to improve our laws in New York...My daughter’s picture was on the Internet and I can’t get it back."
The Wimmers are seeking unspecified monetary damages from most of the defendants in the suit, but they are only seeking injunctive relief from Facebook. According to the couple's lawyer, Ravi Batra, Facebook needs to make sure that this sort of event never happens again. They are also calling on the company to turn over the picture, identify those who viewed or downloaded it and destroy the images in its possession. "If they’re uploading 10 million pictures a month, they need more screeners," he said. "We need future victims, if there are any, to [be able to] hold Facebook accountable."
Facebook, which has yet to see the suit, had no comment.
And the Wimmers aren't stopping with the biggest social network on the scene. Today they are expected to join state legislators from Staten Island to announce a bill that would raise the criminal classification of official misconduct (currently a misdemeanor) to a Class E felony. That change would raise the maximum penalty for a similar crime from one year in jail to up to four years behind bars.
