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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Huckleberries Online

Facebook post snags wrong woman

A case of Facebook mistaken identity has Rachel Marie Triplett and Tri-State Memorial Hospital in the spotlight with hundreds of spiteful comments and threats and calls for her job. Triplett shares the same name as a woman whose racially charged post recently went viral on social media. (Steve Hanks/Lewiston Tribune photo)

Rachel Marie Triplett of Lewiston inadvertently landed in the crossfire of the national debate on racism when a post with her name appeared on Facebook and created a case of mistaken identity. The comments came from a different woman more than 2,500 miles away with the same name. The other woman is a petty officer assigned to the U.S. Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Va., medical center spokeswoman Christina Johnson said in an email. But that didn't stop Triplett, a 23-year-old dialysis technician at Tri-State Memorial Hospital in Clarkston, from becoming the target of hundreds of messages sent to her Facebook page expressing anger toward the post's author. The other woman's post reads in part: "Black lives DON'T Matter anymore than white lives, Asian lives, native American lives, Hispanic lives etc ... So shut the F up and if you got shot, you probably deserved it. End of story"/Elaine Williams, Lewiston Tribune. More here.



D.F. Oliveria
D.F. (Dave) Oliveria joined The Spokesman-Review in 1984. He currently is a columnist and compiles the Huckleberries Online blog and writes about North Idaho in his Huckleberries column.

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