ventured in the slipstream

When homicidal fugitive Danelo Cavalcante terrorized my rural Pennsylvania community, I turned to true crime YouTubers for real-time information.

Screen shot of true crime YouTube streamer T-REV 757’s coverage of the Danelo Cavalcante manhunt.

“Oh, he gotta .22 now!”

Danelo Cavalcante, acrobatic murderer and fugitive from the law, spent his final five days of freedom hunkered down in the rural woodlands of northern Chester County, PA.

As his path of theft, breaking and entering and smart doorbell cameos crept closer to my neck of the woods, mainstream media coverage of the manhunt fell short of providing the information I needed: where are there road closures right now? Where are there police check points right now? Where is the search perimeter right now? Is it safe to take my kids outside right now?

At the same time, sensationalist social media snippets reliably raised my blood pressure but delivered little in the way of reliable intel.

Instead, I discovered a network of true crime livestreamers who were boots-on-the-ground covering the search for Cavalcante in real-time.

It’s thanks to these enterprising muckrakers that I first learned Cavalcante was armed with a stolen .22 rifle, that I heard he altered his appearance by ditching the clothing he was wearing in surveillance footage, that I found out local schools were closed as they became operational command centers for law enforcement, and that I tracked the ebb and flow of the search perimeter as it engulfed our kids’ favorite playground and arterial routes near our home.

Queuing up these live streams to join the digital vigil became part of my nighttime routine as the manhunt wore on. A mosaic of man-on-the-street streams, flight radar tracking surveillance helicopters, and occasional blips of mainstream media coverage beamed from my laptop screen to the crackle of police scanner chatter. These YouTubers were often livestreaming for 10 or more hours at a stretch, meaning I could tune in any time of the day or night and receive up-to-the-minute information from a complement of primary sources to inform my movements or ease my mind.

At one point, I watched a bloated 6abc Action News van lumber into a parking lot and wedge itself into a fleet of armored vehicles, all captured on a YouTuber’s livestreaming camera. Despite the macabre proceedings, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at such a fitting visual metaphor for the moribundity of traditional media amidst the epistemic disruption of user-generated content.

If the true crime livestreamers are any indication, we might all be better off. They were sweating it out on the street in the rain, heat, and humidity of a late Pennsylvania summer to relay real-time information 24/7, while the expert class sat in their climate controlled studios to regurgitate the top hits from official press conferences between commercial breaks.

I, for one, am thankful.

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