Thief Taunts Family on Facebook While Robbing Them

At the Washington Post, Marc Fisher writes about what our very own Jeff Goldberg calls "A Very Post-Modern (and Very Stupid) Burglary." On Friday morning, a thief broke into Fisher's home and stole cash and various electronics. Before leaving, though, he stopped to take a picture of himself and post it to Facebook.

He felt compelled to showboat about his big achievement: He opened my son's computer, took a photo of himself sneering as he pointed to the cash lifted from my son's desk, and then went on my son's Facebook account and posted the picture for 400 teenagers to see. In the picture, the man is wearing my new winter coat, the one that was stolen right out of the Macy's box it had just arrived in.

"I've seen a lot, but this is the most stupid criminal I've ever seen," marveled D.C. police Officer Kyle Roe, who stayed with us for hours as we waited for the crime scene technician, who painstakingly lifted dozens of fingerprints from nearly every room in the house.

My son was coping brilliantly with the trauma of losing his belongings -- until he saw the invasion of his Facebook page. That's when the pathetic indignity of the burglary hit. Here was a space that my son had carefully walled off from public view, limiting access to his page to his friends and schoolmates. And now a lowlife stranger was taunting him in that presumably private zone.

Read the full story at the Washington Post.