Cobb County was in hot water Tuesday morning after making a weekend post about an upcoming ‘escape room’ experience offered by the Parks & Recreation department that encourages participants to pretend they’ve been wrongfully convicted of a crime.
The official government page posted Sunday about a new activity available at the Oregon Park Annex in Marietta. The interactive puzzle-solving game is set on the stage of a prison and those behind bars have been “wrongfully sentenced to life without parole.” A riot is about to take place on prison grounds and participants must plan an escape. “It’s time to get busy living, or get busy dying” the post reads.
The post had hundreds of comments from Cobb County citizens and others about the poor quality of the game, the government’s ‘shameful’ mocking of a wrongful conviction, and the lightheartedness about dying in prison. Others chastised the county’s use of tax dollars to create an experience that simulated a wrongful conviction. As of Monday night at 11:00 p.m., not one comment on the post was positive or in favor of the ‘experience.’
But by Tuesday morning, the post had been deleted.
Under Georgia Open Records law and the state schedule for archiving records, governments are not permitted to delete social media posts without also maintaining a record of all of the comments made on the post as well. The Georgia Virtue has filed an Open Records Request seeking the contents of the posts.
The website detailing the experience, however, is still live.
