Jay, whose name has been changed to protect his security, is a lawyer by training.
“As soon as I saw the news about the attack that night, I knew immediately this was going to be something my team would be working on,” he told me. Unlike most people, Jay couldn’t dwell on his feelings of despair. This turned out to be the second of two shootings, during which the gunman killed fifty people and injured another fifty before being arrested. On his Facebook feed, he learned that, roughly two hours before, a man had entered a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and opened fire. His kids were in bed, and he had just turned on a cooking show on Netflix and pulled out his work laptop to send some e-mails. on March 14th, Jay, a thirty-eight-year-old Facebook employee with parted hair and perpetual stubble, was sitting in his living room, in Austin, Texas.