As students and many other people of the world discover new applications and smart phone techniques, many become familiar with the app “Snapchat.” This app, with a selfie taken by a male adolescent, may just be a major piece of evidence to a horrific murder mystery.

His mother discovered Ryan Mangan dead on Wed, Feb. 4th.

According to CNN.com, “a couple of days after Mangan’s body was discovered, police received a call from a woman whose son received a Snapchat photo from the suspect. The photo had the suspect’s first name across the top, and it matched the description of the crime scene.”

Mangan was only 16-years-old when he died and was from Pennsylvania.

According to CNN.com, “The woman said her son also received messages from the suspect that said ‘Told you I cleaned up the shells’ and ‘Ryan was not the last one.’”

Many people have different uses for the recent top chart app “Snapchat,” but this incident and person might have taken this app too far. It is known by most, if not all, Snapchat users that once you send a Snapchat photo it can only be seen for up to 10 seconds.

Some users might also get an extra time frame if they use their once daily “replay,” or if they screenshot the picture sent on Snapchat.

According to arstechnica.com, “Police said Morton sent the selfie by using Snapchat, an application for smart phones that allows users to send photo messages that disappear from the recipient’s phone within a few seconds. But the boy who received the photo saved it before the message deleted itself. The recipient’s mother contacted Westmoreland County 911.”

The suspect, Maxwell Morton, also the age of 16, was the only one who allegedly sent the photo on Snapchat with the victim of the crime. Police reports said that the victim, Mangan, was shot in the face, and this was his cause of death.

“I’ve never seen it before, but it was a key piece of evidence that led investigators to the defendant,”     Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck said.

Some social media sites have become more than just somewhere for people to share basic days in their lives, and some people have bad uses for these social media sites. This just gives society all the more reason to reconsider some ways to look at technology.