I feel sorry for this guy. His Reddit inbox is probably fucked, and he's absolutely going to get doxxed and hounded by news people, and I wouldn't be surprised if even worse things happened to him.
Good on him for reporting what he saw. He also went to the police the next day and reported it directly. But now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything, which is unfortunate.
This is admittedly very tangential only, but as a non-native speaker / not a US-American, I found this sentence from the NYT reporting[0] a bit confusing:
> John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
Why is the report mentioning the eye contact? Is that culturally significant, as in, in the US you don’t normally do eye contact with strangers, and if a stranger does make eye contact, it’s suspicious?
I think the eye contact in question was a prelude to the two of them kind of following each other around and a minor verbal altercation, so the later context shows that it was probably kind of suspicious eye contact, rather than a friendly "what's up?"
I agree with the other comments that this sentence is just poorly written.
In cities people tend to not make eye contact while walking by each other, though in smaller towns it is more common to acknowledge each other in passing.
In neither case would it be accurate to find eye contact suspicious. The sentence appears to be a summation of several things the person saw, convincing them poorly and creating the ambiguity.
albroland|2 months ago
rationalist|2 months ago
caymanjim|2 months ago
Good on him for reporting what he saw. He also went to the police the next day and reported it directly. But now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything, which is unfortunate.
unknown|2 months ago
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unknown|2 months ago
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ManuelKiessling|2 months ago
> John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
Why is the report mentioning the eye contact? Is that culturally significant, as in, in the US you don’t normally do eye contact with strangers, and if a stranger does make eye contact, it’s suspicious?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/brown-mit-shooting-inv...
wmeredith|2 months ago
jdminhbg|2 months ago
nine_k|2 months ago
zdragnar|2 months ago
In cities people tend to not make eye contact while walking by each other, though in smaller towns it is more common to acknowledge each other in passing.
In neither case would it be accurate to find eye contact suspicious. The sentence appears to be a summation of several things the person saw, convincing them poorly and creating the ambiguity.
strathmeyer|2 months ago
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