This was an interesting documentary and I say interesting because of the way that they recreated the crime.

Crystal was a 24-year-old who was murdered by a gang called the 5150 in a case of mistaken identity where the gang had tried to kill a rival gang member earlier in the day and they thought that Crystal’s car was the rival gang’s.

What is different about this crime in comparison to others is that the family and friends of Crystal created a fake MySpace account for her to try and reel in the gang members to get them convicted of doing the crime. Now it seems while this put gang members onto the police radar it didn’t really work out in the way that they hoped for and in some ways I wonder: was it really worth a Netflix documentary?

I completely understand where her mother is coming from, her daughter has been murdered and she wants justice, and it was quite interesting to see the turmoil of a family member dealing with the tragic death of one of their relatives and going through the stages of grief including nearly setting up a fake party to shoot the guy she believed was her murderer.

Despite none of this happening the murderer is finally convicted 14 years later. Now it’s good that he’s finally convicted and in jail but it’s a shame that it took them so long to actually be able to bring this guy to justice and allow Crystal to finally rest in peace.

I found it interesting how they recreated the crime as they did it by using toys. The fact that they were using toys I did wonder whether Crystal was a child and this was the meaning behind this re-creation, to show that she was young when she died, but she was not a child and so I found the re-creation of toys a little bit humorous and just a bit strange.

Of course it’s fascinating how the family used MySpace to actually track down the killer although this didn’t come to much of a conclusion in terms of the law, but apart from that I didn’t really see why this deserved the Netflix documentary. Of course it’s good to get the crimes out there and to not let Crystal die in vain but at the same time it just seemed a bit underwhelming to me.

I don’t want to come across as insensitive. When you watch so many crime shows you do start to notice patterns in what sort of crime documentaries these networks want to talk about and for me, and with how popular this documentary was, I just expected more and the reality of the situation and the reality of life is sometimes you don’t get more and that’s ok.

What do you think of the documentary?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding