There is the American small business owner who believes his Facebook page is a private diary rather than a storefront window, and Frank Cappello, proprietor of Taste of Italy 23 in Latham, New York, and self-styled livestream personality “Frankie Fresh,” has just given the Capital Region and beyond a masterclass in what happens when that delusion meets a grieving community and a very unforgiving news cycle.
The facts, for anyone who has been mercifully offline: a seven-year-old autistic boy named Harbe Nagi went missing near Menands on June 28. For two days, the whole neighborhood, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, whoever owned a flashlight, turned out to search for him. He was found dead in a pool. Grief, in other words, of the plainest and most devastating kind. And into that grief, under a news anchor’s post about the boy’s death, the official account of Taste of Italy 23 dropped a comment suggesting the child’s own family would have killed him sooner had they stayed in a Muslim country, …
