But when the news of his arrest began to spread on Dec. 11, the first thought that struck an old friend who had known him as a pioneer on Wall Street, was, "There must be an error.
When word spread on Oct. 15 that Los Angeles police had found Mims dead on the floor of his downtown apartment that morning, a familiar dread rippled through the community of former Chargers players.
But as embers flew and flames spread on Nov. 8, terrified animals ran away or refused to get into the car.
As riots in Great Britain spread, on Aug. 11 the British prime minister's reaction was to begin an assault on freedom of speech and assembly by attempting to ban social media and other communication channels, hoping it would quell protesters.
He cited several examples of the use of images from Palestine in the daily Guardian Eyewitness middle page spread: on 21 October a child in Gaza, on 18 October a photo of a West Bank protest and on 12 October another Gaza photo.
According to technology news site Bleeping Computer, the ransomware attack spread on 24 July.
But as rumors spread on Friday, Sept. 12 that Lehman might go under, Pritchard began to sweat.
News of the first holdup spread quickly: On Sept. 23, shortly after 2 p.m., two men entered Red Hook Bait and Tackle on Van Brunt Street, as laid-back a tavern as they come, with lots of mounted fish and taxidermy specimens.
Tweets with #BlackLivesMatter (shown in yellow below) first started to spread early on Nov. 24, just before a grand jury's decision not to indict then-police officer Darren Wilson in the Aug. 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
"The campaigns are spread so thin on Feb. 5, in terms of geography and television coverage.
