newjerseynewsroom.com

BY ADELE SAMMARCO

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

My heart skipped a beat as I scrolled down my Facebook page.

“No! It can’t be true,” I whispered to myself as I mumbled in disbelief, “Bon Jovi Dead!”

Well, I have to admit, the first giveaway was the word, "blog" in the headline.

A bogus press release put-out Monday by Dailynewbloginternational, which states it is just another WordPress.com site, was copied and pasted, tweeted and re-tweeted, and posted to Facebook a whole bunch of times, as word spread like wildfire of the beloved Garden State crooner’s demise.

Any writer worth their salt knows that blogs aren’t a credible source for real news, so, I thought, it just had to be a hoax. Besides, the news channels didn’t break away from their regular programming to announce the rock star’s so-called death. CNN was reporting all day into night the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and still, no word from New Jersey.

Yet, reports over the internet, Facebook and Twitter of Jon Bon Jovi’s untimely death late Monday afternoon brought reporters and hundreds of devoted fans to Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune awaiting any word on his “condition”.

This, as the 49-year-old took center stage at the Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, just a few miles away for the Hope Concert, the fifth installment of a semi-annual charity benefit.

According to the Theatre’s Chief Executive Officer Numa C. Saisselin, “When everyone's smart phones erupted all at once with the news that Jon was dead, everyone thought it was pretty strange, since a guy that looked just like Jon and sounded just Jon and moved just like Jon was standing on the stage just a few feet away.”

Theatre-goers reported the Sayreville native took it all in stride, flashing those trademark pearly-whites while belting out an impersonation of Elvis singing, “Blue Christmas”.

According to the Star Ledger, the rocker made light of the hoax saying, "He even felt the need to rehash the old Mark Twain quip about how the reports of his death had been exaggerated.”

By 6:00 p.m. Monday evening, Jon Bon Jovi had reassured his fans he was alive and well on his official fan website, posting a fresh photo of himself standing in front of a beautifully ornamented Christmas tree while holding up a sign that read, “Heaven looks a lot like New Jersey.”

The Los Angeles Times cited the fake report was copied in part from a 2009 story that announced the death of Michael Jackson. The story had changed some words and details, falsely reporting that Bon Jovi died in New Jersey while on a world tour. Some of the sentences appeared to have been copied from the LA Times story on Jackson's death. The newspaper strongly denies it had any part in the phony report.