The Justin Bieber Paparazzi Death Rumors Have Already Begun

The story of the paparazzo hit by a car after photographing Justin Bieber’s Ferrari is barely 12 hours old, but already the tale appears to be entering its Hollywood Babylon phase, as facts become rumor become legend. Case in point, a pair of stories from TMZ Wednesday, which shed new lurid light on the tragedy that took place on an LA offramp New Year’s Day.

In the world of facts, the narrative is this: The unnamed photographer was following Bieber’s car when it was pulled over on an offramp on New Year’s Day. Believing Bieber was behind the wheel, the paparazzo rushed to the scene on foot, but after being warned away by police, he was struck and killed by oncoming traffic.

In the world of rumor, though, the story changes. No longer was the photographer just in the wrong place at the wrong time—now he becomes a dogged full-time* capturer of Justin Bieber’s photographic image, a modern-day Javert hot on the scoop that Bieber had been smoking weed earlier in the day. His pedestrian pursuit of the vehicle, then, turns into a downfall worthy of Greek tragedy: Hoping to catch the images of Bieber en flagrante that would make his career, he was instead left with nothing, and died a defeated disgrace.

*Full-time in the temporal sense only; the photographer was only a freelancer for the agency he worked for.

And the fateful Ferrari, originally manned only by an “unknown driver” whose only importance was that he was not Justin Bieber, now is alleged to have been piloted by the rapper Lil Twist, a Lil Wayne protege and friend to JB, who TMZ reports was hanging with Bieber at the Four Seasons earlier that night before bolting in the Canadian pop star’s car “for some reason.”

Was Twist caught up in his own nefarious dealings? (Or, more likely, did the LAPD see a young black kid driving an expensive car and do their usual mental math?) We don’t know. These are all just stories. In the real world, all we know is that there’s a man who is dead because his (frankly very terrible-sounding) job required him to tail an 18-year-old kid at all hours of the night, and catch whatever tiny dirt he could.

[TMZ]

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