ICYMI: The pedophile’s friends

The local news cycle offered a bit of sensationalist distraction on Dec. 27 as authorities arrested a Greensboro man, 55-year-old Timothy Fry, for the attempted abduction of an 8-year-old girl at the new Biscuitville on West Market Street.

The story had everything: an innocent child, a sex pervert and even a hero — Greensboro’s Cody Byrd, who intervened when he saw Fry follow the little girl to the restroom.

Naturally, as soon as I heard the guy’s name I had to check on Facebook to get a look at him, and also, this being Greensboro, to make sure I didn’t know him.

Turns out me and Mr. Fry are not Facebook friends, thankfully, but we have more than 30 friends in common, among them prominent local business owners, realtors, a lot of my friends who went to Grimsley, some city employees, a bellydancer I know and a more than a few elected officials including Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan and former Mayor Robbie Perkins.

Now hold on: I know well that we are not our Facebook friends’ keepers, and it’s probably only a matter of chance that I had never clicked “accept” on one of Fry’s social media overtures. So I certainly don’t hold the mayor responsible for being Facebook friends with one of her constituents. You should see my own friends list, full of scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells and other shadowy characters as it is — though, to my knowledge, no pedos.

The lesson, I suppose, is that we all need to be more careful with whom we associate even online, because you never know who spends their off hours hanging around the Biscuitville bathrooms.