UPDATE! After my last email, I received the following from Facebook yesterday:

Hi Amy,

Thank you for providing us with this information. From further investigation and verification, we memorialized your sister’s account. This sets the account privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in Search. Additionally, the profile will no longer appear in the Suggestions section of the home page. The Wall will remain, so friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.

Please note that her account should no longer be removed from the site, but will remain memorialized. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lauren
User Operations
Facebook

HOORAY!! I am leaving this post up, but editing out the disparaging remarks about Facebook. They did come through in the end, after all. I would like for them to restore the rest of the people on her friends list, but since I have posted Nique’s Facebook posts here, it seems a bit of a moot point now. Besides, she only had 28 friends on Facebook, and we all know that in real life she had ten times that many. Overall, I am viewing this irritating battle as a positive thing. It spurred me to make publicly available to all of her friends and family a tiny piece of her personality that was posted on Facebook, to give the world a tiny glimpse of the lovely lady we have lost. Had this never happened, it would have just been available to the 28 people she was friends with, and everyone else would have been left in the dark.

————————————————————————————–
I awoke one morning several weeks ago to find my murdered sister’s account had been hacked, and all of her friends and family deleted and blocked. At this time it was still possible to view her profile by accessing it by ID; we just could not see anything on it.

I contacted Facebook, and the following series of emails transpired. Please pass this along to all of your friends. My hope is that given enough attention, Facebook will pay attention and reinstate my sister’s account.

—–Original Message to Facebook—–
From: amyelk3@gmail.com
To:
Subject: My Personal Account is in a Special Memorialized State

email address: niqueleili@mnncommunications.com
Yes/No: No
full name: Nique Leili
date of birth: 1-11-1967
url: Unknown
additional info: Hello, My sister was found murdered on July 16, 2011. People have been leaving very nice messages on her wall, and I hadn’t asked her account be memorialized yet because I liked seeing her in my friends list when I logged in. I awoke this morning and her account had been deleted.
If her husband, Matthew Leili, requested the deactivation, I ask on behalf of her family that you please reinstate it and place it in a memorialized state. He is the only named suspect in her murder, and if he deactivated her account, it was only to hurt us, her family.

Here is but one of a hundred or so news articles about her death:

http://www.11alive.com/video/1066080805001/0/Police-release-911-call-from-Nique-Leili

Please reinstate her account. Her daughter, Alexandra Page and I derived a great deal of comfort from being able to read her wall, and now that has been ripped from us as well.

Thank you,
Amy Chatham Elk

First response from Facebook, feels like forward motion:

Hi Amy,

We are very sorry to hear about your loss. Per our policy for deceased users, we have memorialized Nique Leili’s account. This sets privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in Search. Additionally, the profile will no longer appear in the Suggestions section of the home page. The Wall will remain, so friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide login information for the account. This is strictly for privacy reasons. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lauren
User Operations
Facebook

My response to Facebook, which went unanswered:

Hi Lauren,

Thank you for getting back to me. I’m afraid that I still cannot see Nique’s wall, and I was one of her 28 confirmed friends. I fear that her account may have been hacked and all of her friends removed and/or blocked. This would have happened sometime on Sunday evening or very early Monday morning.

Is this something you can check into for me? If her account was hacked, can you determine the IP address that it came from?

Thanks,
Amy

And the follow up, because I am a squeaky wheel:

Lauren,

Did you receive my earlier message? I suspect that my sister’s account may
have been hacked and all of her confirmed friends removed and blocked. Can
the Facebook security team please look into this for me? If it is possible
to determine who did this, possibly by IP address, it could be important in
the investigation into her murder.

If you or someone on your team could please get back to me on this matter,
my family and I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Amy Elk

The response I got this time. Note that at this point Facebook added me back to my sister’s friend list, but no one else.

Hi,

Thank you for providing us with this information. The problem with your sister’s account should now be resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please let us know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lauren
User Operations
Facebook

Again, felt like forward motion. Not quite what we wanted, but something:

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Amy Elk wrote:

Hi Lauren,

I notice that I am the only one on Nique’s confirmed friends list as of
right now. She had 28 friends at the time of her death. Is there a way that
everyone on her confirmed friends list can be reinstated, since the blocking
and unfriending was clearly done after her death?

Thanks very much for all your help.

Amy Elk

UNTIL…Two hours later I found I had been deleted again. Apparently somebody has nothing better to do than to watch the internet for ways to make other people miserable. (Oh right I forgot – that’s what the internet excels at!)

My response:

Lauren,

Sorry to be a pest, but her account has disappeared again. I appreciate your
attention in this matter.

Thanks,
Amy

This is the response I got from Facebook. This whole thing is very “There’s a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza.”

Hi Amy,

Thank you for providing us with this information. From further investigation, it appears that a verified immediate family member requested for Nique’s profile to be completely removed from the site. People will not be able to search for it or view any of its information.

Please note that we cannot provide login information for the account. This is strictly for privacy reasons. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Lauren
User Operations
Facebook

I sent the following email this evening in a last ditch attempt to get Facebook to pay attention to what they are supporting:

Lauren,

Yes, as I mentioned below, I am sure a verified member of her family did: her husband, who is the only suspect in her murder! He is not even a Facebook user and only did this to hurt her friends and family. Many of Nique’s family are avid Facebook users and derived comfort from being able to post to her wall.

I would hate to think that in a case like this that Facebook would blindly side with an accused murderer who does not even use their site over the victim’s grieving family. Her daughter, myself, my father, numerous cousins and aunts and uncles, all immediate family, all Facebook users, all hurt by this hateful act.

Please note that I have forwarded this email chain to my attorney. I would thank you to respond to this matter in a more timely fashion, or escalate it as appropriate.

Sincerely,
Amy Elk
Nique Leili’s sister