Page 134

Prosper, Texas

A fter breakfast, Alina goes to her bedroom to check her phone before taking her houseguests—a member of the Facebook page and the woman’s seven-year-old son—to the airport.

She’s away for about fifteen minutes.

When Alina returns, she’s clearly distressed; her houseguest observes that Alina’s face is unrecognizable from all the tears.

What’s happened in those fifteen minutes is an argument over text message with Kristine, which has culminated in all the work Alina has done—on all ten of the Facebook pages she created and administered with her oldest friend—being eradicated.

It’s devastating.

Alina is hardly in a fit state to drive, so her houseguests take an Uber to the airport. Once’s she alone, Alina returns to bed and stays there for the next three days.

The fight between the two Facebook page founders began when Kristine texted Alina to ask if she was promoting a new case-discussion page about the recent controversial suicide of a Myrtle Beach woman, Mica Miller, whose husband was the pastor of a local church. Alina replied that she was.

Kristine responded that she couldn’t believe Alina had started something without her.

Alina explained that she had joined a crime-scene collective as part of a victims’ advocacy foundation because she believed it would result in paid work, which she desperately needed.

Kristine, she thought, would understand.

Alina had financial pressures, and Kristine was so busy with her day job that Alina wanted to forge ahead on this.

She was worried that the podcast project might never happen.

But Kristine did not understand.

After a rapid-fire exchange of escalating, angry, expletive-filled texts, Kristine deleted Alina from every single page they had started together.

Just like that, the childhood friends were done. Over. But so too was everything Alina had worked on for years and years.

And almost immediately their dispute became public. Kristine posted to the Facebook page her side of the story of Alina’s “betrayal.” The post garnered twenty-eight thousand views and almost five hundred comments.

Not all of them were positive.

What does this have to do, some members asked, with the tragic murders of four young innocents in Idaho?

Alivea Goncalves was one of those members. She messaged Kristine that she felt what she’d written on the page was inappropriate.

Alivea felt very sorry for Alina. She knew firsthand how hard Alina worked. Alivea could see how consistently and often Alina had intervened on the page to squash some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories and victim-blaming.

Fearing that the page might be deleted suddenly in the midst of the fracas, Alivea joined another, smaller page, the University of Idaho Murders—Case Discussion as a backup. A couple of days later, Alina became its administrator.

It’s not the outcome Alina had imagined when she and Kristine started their page and it took off so quickly.

And it’s not what Kristine wanted either. The old page no longer accomplishes what it did at the height of the investigation.

Despite the building anticipation around the upcoming trial, there’s less media interest in the Facebook page than there used to be.

Neither Alina nor Kristine is invited to go on NewsNation much anymore.

Privately, both women regret that the page’s focus turned away from the victims and toward their messy personal affairs. But it’s too late to mend fences.