DETROIT (AP) - A woman who says she suffered when she learned that her missing son was found slain in a Detroit sewer has failed to persuade the Michigan appeals court to reinstate her lawsuit over a Facebook post.
Brenda Burton sued Detroit and a water department employee who was accused of writing on Facebook that he had found a "dead body in the sewer" in September 2015. Burton says she went to the site and saw her son, Osean Lockett, under the manhole cover.
Burton says the water employee acted recklessly when he made the Facebook post before police could remove the body. She says she suffered emotional distress.
The appeals court says the post might have been "thoughtless" but it wasn't "utterly intolerable in a civilized community."
Published: Wed, May 01, 2019
