In this Age of Extreme Footage, It's What You Don't See That's the Most Haunting | Opinion

I've been watching the same micro-video over and over—perversely enough, knowing it could be my own nightmare. The 11-second clip from March 30 shows a girl stepping away from a crowded, late-night bar scene to get into an Uber sedan that just pulled slowly around the corner from where she'd been waiting. Her door closes and the car drives off: hardly a riveting documentary.

Except, as we all know now, the Chevrolet Impala that picked her up in Columbia, South Carolina was no Uber. The driver was arrested a day later for allegedly kidnapping and murdering the girl—a 21-year-old college student from New Jersey named Samantha Josephson—and dumping her body in a wooded area 70 miles away. Her cell phone and large amounts of her blood were discovered in the car of the driver, a 24-year-old local with a felony background.

Abetted by surveillance cameras, bodycams and cell phones, human violence and cruelty have increasingly become a reality show. Web sites like WorldStar and LiveLeak capture a steady stream of shootings, stabbings, beatings and hair-pulling brawls. You can choose from your favorite horror show—up to beheadings, and worse.

Major newspapers and TV stations now draw from the same well, with online stories based on videos of people being sucker-punched, chased and murdered by gangbangers, or just spat upon and verbally abused in malls, subways, airplanes and fast-food joints.

All this alarming imagery reveals two key tenets of modern life: cameras are everywhere, and there are countless psychopaths and rageaholics among us for whom no lives matter.

But what is especially chilling about the fake Uber video is there is no shocking "explicit graphic content" depicting rampage or struggle. It seems the most banal, random moment of any young woman's life. You can't even see the driver through his tinted windshield. But you know from news reports that he may have activated the car's child-safety locks, making it impossible for Josephson to escape his attack. There was actually a baby's car seat strapped in the back.

"Whatever you do, please don't get in that car," I repeatedly implore Josephson as she walks toward the Impala holding her phone and trying not to trip in her heels. The time is 2:12 AM, not the safest or most lucid hour, but a throng of night owls still mills about chatting and partying. Why doesn't anyone notice her, stop her, or offer her a ride home? Why doesn't Josephson pause to verify her driver's identity and license plate before entering his deathtrap vehicle? But no matter how many times I hit replay, I can't change the ending. The predator won.

Knowing the grim outcome, I understand better my wife Sarah's fixation to keep a Homeland-like ping on our children's phones well into adulthood—did they land, are they en route, are they at work? Just where are they? Of course, Stephanie Josephson appeared to be in the right place, doing the smart thing after a night of bar-hopping, until worried friends realized the following morning she never returned home. That's the unsettling edge behind all of our real-time connectivity: everything's normal, until it's suddenly not.

I wish I had the power to resist the Josephson clip. Sarah refuses to view such tragic teasers, knowing they will only further exercise her abundant anxieties. An old friend of mine said he never followed news of killings, abductions and other crimes—if it wasn't part of his family or immediate community, he felt he had no need to know about such evil doings.

I'm drawn to the segment in part as a parent, shakily recognizing that in a moment's late-night lapse of concentration, my daughter could have been the one imprisoned in that black Impala and that the bottomless loss of Stephanie Josephson's parents could have been my own. In a way, watching those haunting 11 seconds is an attempt at extreme empathy.

But I also know I'm susceptible to the tabloid sensibility that has turned misfortune into a spectator sport, thanks to the ubiquitous public eye on the street, the back alley, the hotel corridor, or wherever bad things happen. The temptation to look is just too great. And then I look again in disbelief and ponder the infinite what-ifs that could have scripted a different version of reality, allowing Josephson to end her night the way it should and the world never to know her name.

Sadly, much of the grabbed docu-footage playing daily on our screens and phones these days depicts the worst of human behavior. You cannot fathom how little regard some people have for their own kind. And sometimes, it's what you don't see that is truly most disturbing.

Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.​​​​​