Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said, “Facebook has been cooperating with the D.O. J.‾since the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation‾in 2015.

In March 2017, Iracy Torres, sister of the victim, filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles federal court against Facebook alleging that to the extent the company is liable for its employees' actions, the company should be liable for the deaths of Rivera-Bronz lie Maria's and Vera Cruz's family.

The suit „unsuccessfully tried‾on May 11, in U.S. District Court, involves Rivera-Bronz lie Maria, a 38-year-old caregiver, who was pierced and strangled while caring for her brother, 65.

The killer and the victim thought they were meeting in Stone's office in July 2010.

Torres contends in the complaint that her brother was feverish and incoherent, vomited and blacked out. After returning home, she found her brother had been pierced by a knife, shot two times with a .38-caliber pistol, had his throat cut and tried to pry the knife out.

Last March, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office declined to pursue prosecution because the death occurred more than a year before state law requires prosecutors to file charges against the worker who commits misconduct‾no matter the method used, Rivera-Bronz ' Maria alleges.

With a 9-0 vote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a similar request from Larry Bolm at the filing of that case last spring in Los Angeles. "[T]hey will not consider [an] like-for-like challenge to the standard of proof for murder by a worker who is on duty, in this case, in an office," the court wrote.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Facebook moves forward in federal court.

Rocky Toensing is the co-chair of the Perkins Coie LLP's national criminal defense and matters matters switchers practice in Washington, D.C. He is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky and longtime D.C. criminal defense lawyer.

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