It’s been a rough few days for Lisa Ann Snyder of Albany Township, Berks County. She is finding out firsthand the fallout of having a name similar to a person who has been accused of committing a heinous crime.

This Lisa Snyder is not the Lisa Rachelle Snyder, also of Albany Township, who lives a few houses away and who has been accused of hanging her two children.

Despite this, Lisa Ann Snyder has been on the receiving end of death threats and hate mail. Disabled and trying to make her way in the world by creating wreaths, this 52-year-old’s world has been turned upside-down by her wrongful association with this notorious act which has gotten national attention.

Lisa Rachelle Snyder, 36, no relation, has been charged with hanging her 8-year-old son and her 4-year-old daughter with a dog lead. She originally told investigators that the son felt bullied at school and talked about committing suicide but didn’t want to die alone so took his sister with him while the mother was outside having a cigarette.

The arrest came this month after the bodies were found Sept. 23 in the basement of the family home and the mother had called 911. Police said it took that long to check out and debunk the mother’s story and to put together the pieces implicating her.

As for the Lisa Snyder who became the target of social media venom, she responded on Facebook to explain that she is not the Lisa Snyder involved in the crime.

“For the love of God, for anyone to think that of me just sickens me,” she wrote in the Facebook post. “Instead of jumping to disgusting conclusions that it was me, take that energy and pray for these children, our town and the family left behind.”

Jumping to conclusions has become way too common in our social media world. Too many users are eagerly willing to pile on a person who has been mistaken for someone with the same or similar name.

And it hurts, as Lisa Ann Snyder will tell you. She is suffering from complex regional pain syndrome, which resulted in the recent partial amputation of a leg that has now confined her to a wheelchair.

“Stop sending me hate mail,” she wrote. “Only ignorant people would assume it’s me.”

There are scores of similar cases of mistaken identity that have led to social media bullying and shaming. In 2014, Kendall Jones, a student at Texas State University, starting getting messages and couldn’t figure out why.

She was being called “a lion killer” by people she didn’t know. It turned out that another young woman by the name of Kendall Jones, a Texas Tech cheerleader, had been posting photos of herself next to an African lion that she had hunted and killed.

Vile messages included, “I hope you get raped in Africa and die of (expletive) AIDS.” Another wrote, “You kill animals, and I hope your whole family dies.”

Snyder and Jones discovered what other targets of online shaming campaigns have found out — no mercy is spared in the nastiness of the messaging.

A number of people named James Holmes were bombarded with hate messages after a person with the same name shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012.

The same was true for a Wisconsin dentist named Palmer who received nearly three dozen angry phone calls from people thinking that he was the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer who killed Cecil the lion in 2015.

In her book, “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” Boston University law professor Danielle K. Citron found that writers of hate messages feel shielded by the anonymity of the internet. She said that these innocent targets might suffer unintended consequences. Employers might dismiss them or they might be passed over for job opportunities, she said.

It may seem patently unfair that people would attack a person without doing some minimal investigation, but, according to Citron, some don’t bother to try to figure out whom they are targeting because there are rarely any serious consequences for the attacker.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com