(Newswire.net — February 9, 2015) — Jeannette, Pa. – If you don’t have selfie, it didn’t happen, selfie pilgrims say. A 16-year-old Maxwell Marion Morton wanted his friend to know that he shot their Classmate 16-year-old Ryan Mangan, so he took a selfie and shared the picture.
According to news reports, Morton of Jeannette, Pa., fatally shot 16-year-old Mangan in the face before taking a photo with Mangan’s body and uploading it to Snapchat. Snapchat is a smartphone application that allows users to send images that are deleted a few seconds after they’re received.
Fox News has reported that Morton then sent the image to a friend. The friend managed to save it on his phone before it was deleted from Snapchat. He showed the photo to his mother who alerted the police.
Police received a copy of the photo showing the Mangan’s body in the chair “with a gunshot wound to the face,” a police affidavit states, according to the Tribune-Review. The picture also depicts a black male taking the ‘selfie,’ with his face facing the camera. The photo had the name ‘Maxwell’ across the top.”
Police also say the friend received more text messages from Morton, saying: “Told you I cleaned up the shells” and “Ryan was not the last one,” CBS Pittsburgh reported.
Police found a 9-millimeter handgun hidden in Morton’s home. Morton confessed the killing and has been charged as an adult with first-degree murder, homicide and illegal possession of a firearm, the Tribune-Review said.
“I’ve never seen it before,” district Attorney John Peck told the Tribune-Review, pointing to the selfie as “a key piece of evidence that led investigators to the defendant.”
Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center and a psychology and social media instructor at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif., said, “this is really a question about criminal pathology rather than technology.”
She told the Tribune-Review, “Perpetrators in need of validating their power and sense of self-importance have used all kinds of communications to ‘brag’ about criminal activities — from the local hangout to social media like Facebook.”