WATCH: Seven women are being slammed on social media after exercising poor judgement at the scene of a disaster. Peter Kim reports.
TORONTO – A group of seven women are providing the world with a lesson of where not to take a selfie after a photo of them in front of the rubble of a New York City apartment building that burned down last week went viral.
The photo of the seven women shows them huddled together with an iPhone holstered in a selfie stick while police trucks litter the road behind them.
The photo went viral and was posted on the front page of the New York Post Monday with the headline “Village Idiots.”
But the women weren’t the only ones. A reporter for Newsday tweeted a photo of another reporter taking a selfie while at the scene.
A former communications director for the Iowa Democratic Party was also caught up in the online furor over selfies in front of the building.
Christina Freundlich apologized Monday in an email to the Des Moines Register saying she was “deeply sorry for my careless and distasteful post.”
Her Instagram photo showed her in front of the building smiling and holding up the peace sign, and was captioned “scene of the accident.”
And The New York Times reported Sunday that the site has become a sort of tourist attraction despite the ongoing search for bodies.
READ MORE: ‘Sopranos,’ ‘Sons of Anarchy’ star Drea de Matteo loses apartment in NYC blast
The newspaper reported that signs have been posted on doors close to the collapse asking tourists to leave.
“This is a tragedy, not a tourist attraction,” one sign said according to the newspaper. “Show some respect.”
Two bodies have been pulled from the rubble of the apartment building since a gas explosion caused it to collapse last week.
Authorities have not identified the people but say two men are still missing: Moises Lucon, 26, and Nicholas Figueroa, 23, were both thought to be in a sushi restaurant on the ground floor of the building at the time of the explosion.
But selfies at the sites of tragedies are nothing new. A Tumblr account “Selfies at serious places,” is dedicated to the questionable practice and features selfies of people in front of Holocaust museums, with their grandmother’s ashes, and at Chernobyl.
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