Twitter Tragedy: A Cry for Help Unheard

Cleveland, OH — The body of a young woman who will perhaps forever be known simply as sadgirl1188 was found early Tuesday morning in her apartment, dead of an apparent suicide. Was she a victim of the phenomenon of social networking?

Suzie Gernsall, who spoke on condition of complete lack of anonymity, said she had learned of her friend’s demise through a mutual acquaintance. “She Twittered ‘killing myself’ and a little later,’dying’. But, honestly, I wasn’t following her anymore. She’d turned into a real bummer. She stopped Stumbling stuff, her MySpace bulletins were out-of-date and her Facebook page went on and on about some girl named Sylvia Plath, who isn’t even in our network—I checked. After that, I deleted her and told everybody else to, too. But she never knew. It’s nice that you can do it like that now, so you don’t hurt anybody’s feelings.”

The local pizza delivery person was shocked and saddened by the news. “She always ordered online because she didn’t like to talk,” he recalled. “I noticed it was taking her longer and longer to answer the door lately. Also, she was tipping a lot better.”

Her brother, who lives in a nearby gated community, was devastated. “I hadn’t seen her in a while but she’d installed a GPS tracker in her cellphone, so I always felt like I could keep an eye on her. She started wearing those adult diapers after we all heard about that crazy astronaut lady. She said it was just in case she got too depressed to get up from the couch when she had to go. But she seemed really into her new marketing blog, so I thought she was okay.”

Although she had left out extra food and water and had died only hours earlier, the victim had been substantially gnawed on the areas of her body not covered by her filthy bathrobe. Police, shaken by the gruesome discovery, alerted Animal Control personnel, who removed her two cats, Dieter and Scooby, from the premises.

Within hours, images of their adorable bloodied maws began circulating the Internet with a petition to “Save the kitties. Send this to 7 people within the next 10 minutes and you won’t believe what comes up on your screen. I don’t know how, but this really works!!!” PETA is rumored to be mounting a vigorous defense of the felines, citing, among other things, “the irresistible succulence of human soft parts.”

A search of the dead woman’s email revealed thousands of unanswered Digg shouts and several “Is it time to reorder?” queries from Vitamin Shoppe.

A source inside Twitter remarked that the site sometimes goes down for maintenance, causing a member’s lifestream to be briefly interrupted without warning. An upgraded suicide filter is said to be in the offing.

A neighbor of the dead young woman waxed philosophical when informed of the loss. “I don’t know if you could call it a tragedy, really. I mean, the girl didn’t really have any friends.”