Hayley Pelock Memorial Facebook Page Battles Internet 'Trolls'

Anyone looking for evidence that nothing is sacred anymore can just log into Facebook, according to an admin for .

In the three months since the 19-year-old Marian Catholic graduate's , the Facebook page has seen intermittent attacks from "Internet trolls."

A troll is typically someone who intentionaly provokes arguments on Internet comment sections and forums, but Jacob Kosarko, who created the page, said people were doing much more than starting arguments on Pelock's page.

"They used gory photos, threatened the family," Kosarko said. "Since I admin-ed Hayley's page, I deleted the trolls and banned them right away. This is cyber-bullying taken to a whole new extreme."

Kosarko noted one instance in which someone doctored a picture of Pelock to include an obscene sexual joke.

He compared the attacks to the actions of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS, which has become known for picketing the funerals of soldiers and celebrities.

"These Internet trolls have attacked so many things and people, they need to be stopped," Kosarko added. "They are anonymous bullies hiding behind a computer screen, attacking helpless people."

Rosa Petrongelli, who is also an admin for the page, said she was outraged at some of the things she saw.

"When I first saw the negative remarks I was so angry," Petrongelli said. "I could not believe that people would put things like that on a page that is honoring someone so special."

Pelock's mother, Andrea, also oversees the page and helps Kosarko and Petrongelli vet a lot of the comments and wall posts for inappropriate language and photos.

"I know that her mom has seen some of the comments and I am sure it was hurtful," Petrongelli added. "I guess these individuals prey on sites like Hayley's, they must think it is funny but they don't realize that the people who are reading their comments are in mourning and the kind of words they post are hurtful and mean."

Both Petrongelli and Kosarko said the amount of trolling on Hayley's page has gone down since they started monitoring it more closely, but Kosarko said he has seen pages that have been completely taken over by trolls.

"They search for R.I.P. pages like Hayley's or this girl named Shariah Casper's on Facebook or MySpace . . . to defame and post hateful messages," Kosarko explained, adding that the biggest difficulty in battling the trolling problem is that Facebook doesn't respond when people report trolling pages.

"They use porn, naked corpses, hurtful posts and much more to get a rise out of people, and it works," Kosarko added. "Even if it doesn't work, they keep on doing it and it spreads like wildfire with more and more trolls popping up with fake accounts and pages."