A Nova Scotia lawyer is trying to spread the word that, despite some Internet rumours, he is alive and well.
It all started last Friday when criminal attorney Jim O’Neil received a frantic call from the sheriff’s department in Amherst.
“She said ‘I’m glad to hear your voice…everybody thinks you’re dead.’”
O’Neil began hearing the same story from friends and colleagues - that he had been sentenced to that courtroom in the sky.
The rumor appears to have started on Facebook, although O’Neil doesn’t have an account on the social media site.
He sent out a mass email to everyone on his contact list to set the record straight.
“This couldn’t have occurred even five years ago to anybody, but with the Internet, things spread so quickly, just in no time at all,” he says. “When something goes viral, that’s it, it’s out there.”
The rumour even made it to the local coffee shop, where news of O’Neil’s passing stunned the crowd.
“I just seen him a few minutes ago walking down the street there and, you know, it’s kind of weird how one minute he’s dead and then you see him walking,” says Travis Gillard.
“People tend to post things without thinking on Facebook because it’s not real. It’s not impacting them immediately,” says Richard Clark. “So things get messed up and jumbled around and then confusion like this happens.”
O’Neil has been taking the news of his death with a smile and a laugh. He figures the confusion began with the passing of another local lawyer with a similar last name.
He says it’s hard to fight rumours online, because once they reach the Internet, it’s hard to make them go away.
“It’s like the biblical guy who goes on the mountaintop, releases a bag of feathers and then says ‘go find them.’ Well, you can’t, they are just all over the place,” says O’Neil.
O’Neil says he hopes that by doing media interviews he will be able to dispel the rumour that he’s dead.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Dan MacIntosh
