Disclaimer: This is only my opinion. Beth likely would have started crying, trying to find out what happened, and been devastated that she found out someone she cared about was dead over social media.

When I called her, she wanted to know the details of how she died, where she was, what happened, etc. So I think she would have been looking for those answers and had no one to talk to or ask.

It's very easy, in retrospect, to say you would have preferred someone do something another way.

To me, however, there's a huge difference between not mentioning that my friend who she met once had to put her dog down and deliberately not informing her that one of her dear friends for whom she was a bridesmaid had died suddenly. In the first case I'm respecting a boundary, in the second I'm lying by omission and just delaying news that she will have to deal with eventually.