Trayvon Martin’s email and Facebook accounts hacked by white supremacist: report
A protester carries a poster reading “I am Trayvon Martin” during a rally in downtown Washington on Wednesday.
The media website Gawker reports that e-mail and social network accounts belonging to the slain Florida teenager Trayvon Martin appear to have been hacked by a white supremacist.
The site says it has confirmed that at least one of Trayvon’s e-mail accounts has been hacked in an attempt to smear the boy as a drug user who brought his killing on himself.
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An apparent hacker using the pseudonym Klanklannon posted what were purportedly Trayvon’s private Facebook messages to the raucous message board 4chan on Tuesday.
The information was posted on slides that accused Trayvon of smoking cannabis and dealing drugs, among other claims couched in hateful and racist words. The posts, which have since been deleted, also contained lists of usernames and passwords.
Gawker claims a source came upon these posts Tuesday night and was alarmed.
“Our source panicked upon seeing that trolls had started using the account to send emails under Martin's name, and deleted the account. (An email sent to Martin's Gmail address bounced back today; Martin's Twitter account has also been deactivated),” wrote Gawker’s Adrian Chen.
But Chen notes that the true contents of Trayvon’s accounts was far more poignant as “the picture they paint is of a normal high school junior preparing for college.”
“A screenshot of Trayvon's Gmail inbox our source provided us is heartbreaking. Martin apparently used his Gmail account for his college search, and it's filled with emails about upcoming SAT tests and scholarship applications.”
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As information continues to emerge about the apparently stalled police investigation into Trayvon’s killing, MSNBC reports that the mayor of the city where Trayvon died overruled police and prosecutors who resisted releasing emergency 911 calls from the night of the killing.
Jeff Triplett, senior vice president at United Legacy Bank and part-time mayor of Sanford, Florida, told the news outlet that Martin’s family asked for the recordings and he told them, “We’re not here to hide anything.”
See our complete Trayvon Martin case coverage.