Police in Madrid and Fort Lauderdale were notified, launching investigations on each side of the Atlantic.
Ana Maria Knezevic traveled from South Florida to Spain in December to get away for a while. Her family and friends say the naturalized American originally from Colombia has been going through a nasty divorce from her Serbian husband, but the trip was also a chance to explore new places.
Then, she vanished — two weeks ago, shortly after a man wearing a motorcycle helmet disabled the security cameras at her Madrid apartment building by spray painting the lenses. The next day, two friends received separate text messages — one in English, one in Spanish — from the 40-year-old’s phone saying she was running off for a few days with a man she had just met.
“She wouldn’t do this … it is very unsafe and crazy behavior. She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do that,” said Sanna Rameau, the friend who got the English text. It was written, she said, in an emotionless style that wasn’t Ana’s. The Spanish message was so flat it appeared to have been written in English and run through Google Translate, she said.
My example isn’t in the news everyday because our people don’t care about them, otherwise the news would report on them.
Our news knows what drives views. We largely only worry about people of means who are preferably also photogenic who are in trouble.
It scales too. We basically moved heaven and Earth to rescue that billionaire’s goo from the bottom of the Atlantic from trying to show off as it dominated the entire news cycle and the nation and world held its breath for a week.
It’s the world we live in, I just find it morbid, inhuman, and proof of a severe socio-cultural disease.