Murder of Anna Svidersky

Richard Watson, in his book Future files: the 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years, discussed "digital immortality" through internet records, and cited Svidersky, whose MySpace page would "remain, potentially forever" as her "digital afterlife". Der Spiegel said that Svidersky was famous, albeit posthumously, in a new way—not via traditional media as in the time of Andy Warhol, but as with the Star Wars Kid through the web page/blog/video and google hits.

A memorial video In Memory of Anna Svidersky on YouTube, which has now been removed, was viewed more than 3,000,000 times by April 2011, five years after the incident.

Sullivan was captured soon after the attack. He had discarded the knife he used, but was still covered in blood when discovered. He was charged with first-degree murder, but on June 26, 2007, he was acquitted by reason of insanity and was committed indefinitely to a mental hospital.

The McDonald's restaurant where she worked in Vancouver held a fund-raising day for her family, hoping to raise $15,000, but actually achieved nearly $85,000, as of April 28, 2006, and finally ran out of food. McDonald's Corp. matched $1.50 per dollar and other local McDonald's franchises 25 cents per dollar.

The news of Svidersky's murder spread worldwide within days through internet sites, creating a phenomenon of collective grief from users, the great majority of whom were complete strangers to her. In Britain, The Guardian newspaper compared the widespread expression of grief by strangers to that seen after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The paper cited the 2004 CIVITAS think-tank, which described such grief as "mourning sickness", related to people's own emotional needs, rather than any real rapport with the deceased. De Volkskrant likened the mass mourning to that which followed the death of Dutch singer, André Hazes, and also pointed to existing personal loss as the major cause.

Anna Svidersky was born in Russia. Her family came from Novoorenburg, a small city near the border of Kazakhstan and about 900 miles southeast of Moscow. They moved to California before her second birthday. She had one older brother and two younger sisters. In 2001, her mother, Esther, moved with the children to Vancouver, Washington, where she has relatives, after a divorce from Andrew Svidersky.

Anna Esther Svidersky (April 26, 1988 – April 20, 2006) was a teenager who lived in the U.S. city of Vancouver, Washington. She was murdered while working in a McDonald's restaurant, by David Barton Sullivan, a schizophrenic twice-convicted sex offender. News of her death quickly spread worldwide, initially through the Internet friends site MySpace, where she had a personal page, and then through other similar sites. The widespread expression of grief over Anna's death by strangers around the world was compared by The Guardian newspaper in Britain to that seen after Diana, Princess of Wales' death.