Budding romance on FB turns to murder-suicide.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW DELHI: A budding Facebook romance has ended in tragedy in the Madhya Pradesh city of Jabalpur, with a housewife and a 22 year-old man both dead after the first time they finally met in-person turned violent.
Vineet Singh, from the Muzaffanagar region of Uttar Pradesh, met Jyoi Kori on Facebook at some point within the last three years. Kori, a housewife who was reportedly bored with her domestic situation, had taken to Facebook to meet new people, and created an account by posting a picture of a film actress and saying she was just 21 years old.
Singh and Kori met on the social media site and began corresponding, over the course of which romantic feelings began developing on both ends. Finally, last week, the two decided to meet face-to-face at the Marble Rocks Waterfall in Jabalpur, but when Singh finally saw who Kori was, he allegedly became angered and upset that he had been lied to.
Singh was a victim of an increasingly common trend called “catfishing,” in which people falsely represent themselves online in order to meet the other person. The term comes from a 2010 documentary film in which a young man met a young woman online, only to later discover that she was a middle-aged woman who not only looked nothing like the photos she was using, but was using someone else’s photos to represent herself without that person’s consent.
Kori’s duplicity ultimately drove Singh to shoot her, and then shoot himself. Singh, however, survived the gunshot wound, and was found by people in the area shortly thereafter. He was immediately taken to the local hospital, but succumbed to the bullet shortly thereafter.
Singh was unemployed at the time of his death on Friday night, and had told his family that he was going to New Delhi to investigate potential job prospects. Kori, who leaves behind a husband and three children, told her family that she would be at her mother’s house for two days, freeing herself up to meet her paramour.
Kori’s husband is a clerk with the government’s irrigation department. He and his late wife have a 21 year-old daughter and two younger children, who have not been identified. No one in the family had any idea what Kori was up to, and were shocked to discover that she had been deceiving them for three years with her Facebook activities.
A full investigation is still underway, according to the Jabalpur Police SP Harinarayanachari Mishra, despite both involved parties being deceased.