This Costume Will Make You Sick

It seems like this is the year for inappropriate/horrifying Halloween costumes. As though we hadn't already had our what-the-?! quota filled by Julianne Hough donning blackface, ”Anna Rexia”, and two Florida teens dressing up as Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, one girl decided to outdo them all and go to work as a Boston Marathon bombing victim, complete with injuries. And then post it on Twitter. Her caption? "And the most offensive costume at work to...#toosoon?"

Oh no, not at all. If you've lost your sense of humanity.

The 22-year-old Michigan native, Alicia Ann Lynch, put together the outfit by wearing running shorts, a blue t-shirt, and a paper number on her stomach (runner 739, if you're wondering). She then finished off the look by adding some fake blood and injuries, (because she was, after all, not a bystander in the bombings) and, ta-da! An authentic, injured victim of the terrorist attack that shook the East Coast earlier this year! A picture of the completed "costume" was then uploaded onto both Twitter and Instagram (see it below), which of course unleashed a whole slew of reactions from the social media world, from death threats to finding and circulating nude pictures that Lynch had once uploaded onto Tumblr.

The Twittersphere's rage grew to such uncontrollable levels that Lynch's family began receiving phone calls and death threats from people who'd seen the costume. Really dedicated social media users even tracked down her father's company and employer.

Even after Lynch tweeted (from a now deactivated account),"Plz stop with the death threats towards my parents. They did nothing wrong. I was the one in the wrong and I am paying for being insensitive," and, later, "Please stop spreading around my parents number, and my home address. THEY DID NOTHING WRONG," the harassment continued.

Eventually, Lynch tweeted an apology, saying she'd been fired by her employer over the scandal, and some Twitter users sent forgiving Tweets in response.

"I have been fired from my job. I am paying for what I thought was a simple joke. I know it was wrong now. I wasn't thinking," she tweeted. "I'm sorry," she said later, in a separate tweet.

The Boston Bombings of course occurred in April of this year, when two pressure cookers exploded, killing 3 people and injuring an estimated 264 others. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was featured on the cover of a controversial issue of Rolling Stone earlier this year, was one of the two brothers behind the attack.

The most horrifying thing about this whole episode? Lynch actually wasn't alone in the idea.

I guess we should be grateful she didn't pair up with this guy and make a soul-nauseating combo:

Can we please all go back to dressing up as Alice in Wonderland characters next year?

Images: Bob Tema/Flickr; BuzzFeed