Immediately after the Casey Anthony verdict was announced, Julia Chick’s shocked friends began posting comments on Facebook and Twitter.

“My feed blew up!” said the 20-year-old Oakwood woman, who attends college in St. Louis.

Anthony was found not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter and aggravated child abuse in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee. She was found guilty of lesser charges not directly related to the death.

Chick’s social-media experience parallels conversations that took place throughout the Miami Valley last week, as folks of all ages and backgrounds tried to make sense of a complex court case involving a bizarre series of circumstances that may never be explained and a cast of characters that may never be understood. Many are angry and upset.

Mary Beth DeWitt, a psychologist at Dayton Children’s, says social media has indeed provided easier access to ongoing information throughout the Anthony trial and also has allowed the public to communicate opinions more quickly and effectively.

“People are talking about it regularly, looking at websites and blogs, and they’ve had more access to day-to-day information about it,” she says.

“I just don’t understand why they found her not guilty,” said a puzzled Phyllis Schneider of Kettering, who has three children, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. “They should have found her guilty on something, even if it was the lesser of the three (major) charges.”

“Unbelievable!” said Steve Zeiss of Huber Heights. “Terrible! All the evidence was she’s guilty.”

Caryl Philips of Harrison Twp. believes Casey Anthony wasn’t looking for her daughter because she knew all along where she was.

“It’s just common sense to me,” said the Harrison Twp. woman. “It’s an open question how the child died, but something happened and she covered it up.”

Sandra M. Hunt, director of the victim/witness division of the Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office, believes emotional public response to the trial is intensified because the victim was a child.

“Children are our most vulnerable citizens,” Hunt said. “As a community, we believe that everyone, especially mothers, should love and care for their children. When this does not occur, there is an emotional outcry and a need to protect them.”

She says communities often rally together to help look for missing children and this creates a common bond.

“When a child is not found alive, the community believes that someone should be punished,” Hunt said. “The community in a sense becomes the child’s representative, standing up for the rights of the innocent.”

Also representing the child is Care House, a local children’s advocacy center that responds to allegations of abuse.

In the Anthony case, said director Libby Nicholson, the death of a child has been coupled with intense media coverage. In its attempt to give the public a window into the courtroom experience, she believes, the media has also served to inflame the court of public opinion.

“I think the public has had an opportunity to witness the court proceedings, and they have in their own minds weighed the evidence and are appalled that this woman was not found guilty of what appears to be, in the opinion of many, a homicide and not an accidental death,” Nicholson said.

“We talk a lot about our criminal justice system being the finest, fairest system in the world, but I think in reality there are constraints of that system. Just because we had the opportunity to sit in on this trial does not necessarily mean we understand all the rules of evidence or all the instructions given to the jury, or all the deliberations that go on in the jury room.”

Nicholson, who worked as a social worker on the child abuse team at Dayton Children’s before becoming director of Care House in 1998, said there are facts about the case that she finds extremely troubling.

“What I can tell you definitively is that the parents of children who die accidentally don’t lie about it; they don’t wait 31 days before reporting the deaths, and those are facts of this case that are seemingly indisputable,” Nicholson said. “That is what the public is responding to and we should be appalled by that. We have a dead 2-year-old child and none of these people, many of whom have the ability to lie without any kind of remorse, none are stepping up to tell us how this baby died. And maybe that’s why the jury came back with a not-guilty verdict.”

Nicholson said it’s also important to remember that a not-guilty verdict does not mean that a person is innocent of a crime. What it means, she says, is the jury, with the instructions they were given, did not feel they had sufficient evidence to convict her.”

Danielle DeTrude, a junior at the University of Dayton, learned that important lesson in her business law class.

“We learned that in criminal cases, in order to be found guilty, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said. “Without full evidence, it’s hard to convict. Watching her reactions in the trial, I would lean toward her being guilty. However if it’s not proven, there’s nothing anyone can do.”

Nicholson believes there is one final reason the community is reacting so emotionally to this case.

“Anytime a child is dead under such mysterious circumstances, particularly with the lies and behavior associated with it,” she said, “we are desperately sad and want someone to be held accountable.”