@Ed - Guns

It was a very unusual situation - a death being broadcast live on the Internet. The officer was just ensuring his own protection. He probably had no idea about the method of death - for all he knew the guy was sitting there bleeding to death holding a gun.

It sounds like the officer ensured his own safety, the safety of the victim (unfortunately dead) and then acted to ensure the victims dignity by covering the webcam. What more could he do?

Why don't you try putting yourself alone into situations where people are frequently armed, drugged up and not thinking straight every day? You may find you are careful to ensure your return to your family each evening.

Maybe he got what he wanted...?

Might be distasteful to the "why didn't someone stop him?" crowd, but perhaps this kid really was carrying out a carefully-planned and deliberate act, and perhaps there was no reason why anyone should feel entitled to obstruct him in that.

Maybe Abe didn't want to be alone at the end, but knew that if he asked loved ones to be with him they'd interfere? Maybe he really wanted to send a *fuck you* to as many humans as possible, by the medium of webTV?

Yes it's sad for the family when people suicide, but (assuming they're exercising informed consent) it's their choice, not ours. There's this assumption that we're entitled to grab any poor loser who's crawling out of the swamp and pull them back in, because we know what's best for them. Again emphasising informed consent, I don't think we have that right at all.

Some people encouraging him...

... may have been under the nothing-on-the-Internet-is-real effect. Whatever pleasure you get from even pretending to egg on a suicidal person is sick, granted, but I can't quite blame people if they just didn't take the situation seriously. After you encounter enough trolling, you may learn that it's generally quite foolish to feel some serious emotional reaction to something you found online. This could easily have been made up - bigger and dumber pranks have happened. A big psuedo-anonymous environment does not foster trust, so it's a terrible place to turn when you need to be taken seriously - such as in the typical cry-out-for-help suicide.

@ Armus Squelprom / Christopher Martin

Whilst your comments may well be valid for those who stood back, didn't interfere and/or didn't try to change his mind, I find it hard to see how such thinking justifies encouraging a person to take their own life.

Suicide

I am 59 now, happy and successful - but I was there (ie sucidal) 38 years ago. I had a lousy 4th year at university (after doing well for three years) when I suffered from depression, drink problems, debt and the constant anxiety of falling further and further behind with my studies. The one problem fed all the others, and i just drank all the more and got deeper into it...

My own hints to my friends that i would do it went unnoticed... OK, I failed and ended up in hospital - but that was only because of my lack of understanding of pharmacology, and not in any way because the attempt was half-hearted

One lesson I learned that year was that you must never, ever take any threat of suicide lightly. Never. OK, if it's someone on a server and you don't know them then you might think you have no way of influencing things - but maybe you should step in, even if if the guy in question turns out to just to be a bit drunk.

If any of my friends over the years have ever even mentioned death I have listened to them very seriously and talked to them equally seriously (but of course sympathetically).

Again, not so easy when someone is 5000 miles away and might just be an idiot - but I do ask people to treat these threats seriously.

@Davey Bee

Well said!

I too have been there, although without the courage to actually carry out the act. But still, the thought and the intent was very real indeed.

I feel really pleased for those that have never felt the urge or need to end their own life. But for those of us that have, the report of this young mans death is very much more sad indeed - made even more so by the fact that 'the watchers' who encouraged him showed, if nothing else, an incredible lack of maturity or care. It matters not whether they considered this young mans actions an act - the fact is that they took the time to be voyeurs in this mans last hours not knowing if it was real or not.

The fact that there's no way that they could have been sure should have had them picking up a phone and getting him some help.

I disgusts me to think that some of those voyeurs got some kind of cheap thrill from watching this young mans demise. Even if they didn't think it was real, they still took the time to watch it.

How very sad have we, as humans, become?

What really gets me

is that the police were called so late, and not even by anyone who had viewed the live webcam! Why did not a single person viewing the overdose on the webcam stream try to call the police? It's a classic case of "someone else will take care of it".

Webcam theatre

Many of the people who set up their own webcams or upload videos to Youtube do so because they thrive on the theatre of the enterprise, and people watch for exactly the same reasons. There are a lot of actors, putting on performances to entertain. Given the extremely low number of people who have killed themselves 'live', I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that many of those watching had no idea he was serious. It may seem sick that he was being egged on, but that may have all been part of the pantomime. Macabre? Yes. Evil? No.

From what I've read of the incident, he simply 'fell asleep' on camera. Now perhaps a particularly astute viewer (incidentally we've no idea what kind of audience he was streaming to - they could have all been kids like him?) could have got in contact with the authorities straight away, as it's certainly better safe than sorry. However, it's not as if he was slowly bleeding to death in front of their eyes.

Finally - bruceld et al - it seems to me that, by hoping the viewers "...will get (their) chance to suffer one day..." you're far worse than anyone who egged him on. Firstly, you're leaping in to judge and condemn people in the harshest terms with practically no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the events. Secondly you prance around in self-righteous indignation while openly displaying the vile savagery of your own minds. Your purile "down with these sickos! lets torture them!" brand of vengeance is both irrational and pathetically hypocritical.

Illusory anonimity

As usual we have a bunch of pricks hiding behing the net. Is it a crime in the US to encourage somebody to take their own life? If it is I hope the police track down these idiots and prosecute them.

There are far too many tossers on the net who think that they can say and do what they like online because they are anonymous. Sometimes though it backfires. Some arsehole kid was harassing and threatening a friend of mine online a few years ago. He thought hiding behind an anonymous proxy made him safe. Unfortunately for him the extended internet community we were part of meant that people, knew people who knew people and it wasn't too long before we'd tracked the idiot down to his home address in Austin, TX. An email to his father threatening to involve the police elicited a written apology and the father promised us his son would be barred from using the net for some considerable time. There's one little prick who realised he was not as anonymous as he thought. I for one wanted to involve the police rather than his father but was outvoted.

@ Bad Beaver

Although guns might be a bit on the strong side, I get the impression that it's policy here in the UK to treat the suicidle as a potential threat. I had to phone an ambulance for a friend of mine after she texted me to say she'd taken a load of pills to kill herself, and the operator was quite stern about asking if she was prone to violence.

It's fair enough, I guess. When someone's at the point of suicide, it's not as if they've got a great deal left to lose, and nor will they be in an especially rational state.

Died from..

..an overdose of drugs prescribed *to treat depression*

Should they, perhaps, not give them out in sufficient numbers to cause death to people who may well be inclined to use them that way?

Not blaming the authorities, if someone wants to kill themselves then that is their prerogative, going to all the trouble of allowing people to witness it.. I can't help but wonder if they expected to get stopped by the police/ambulance/etc before the end.

IT Angle

Some reports in the printed media are using this as a reason to bring up the 'Let's control the internet' angle, as if the government controlling the internet would have stopped this. Personally I think this is completely irrelevant, the internet didn't encourage him to commit suicide, he obviously had some problems that he felt were beyond his control that were nothing to do with the internet and which unfortunately those around him didn't recognise. The only internet angle is that he tried to reach out through the 'net to other people, presumably in an attempt to gain the attention he was lacking in real life that could have helped him.

Unfortunately this won't stop fucktards like Herr Schmidt claiming it as a reason for the government to control the internet, which if they show the same competence as they've done with the economy should bring it to a complete halt around mid-April 2009.

There was a movie...

...called "Untraceable", in which a psychopathic killer who was also an IT expert lured people into his basement den, where he would set them up in a slow-death mechanism live on webcam. This mechanism was actuated by people visiting his website, called "killwithme.com". The more people visited the website to view the cam coverage, the faster the death-mechanism proceeded. The movie showed large numbers of commenters on the site's chat thread gloating about the dying victim.

As a result of this movie, there really is a site called www.killwithme.com, whose entry page looks exactly like the site in the movie. Click the "Enter" button, and the site will pop up a confirmation dialog warning you that entering this site will harm innocent people (Continue? Yes/No). The last time I looked at it, it said 87% of visitors ignored the warning (so 13% heeded it). (And yes, I did click Yes on my first visit to see what was actually on the site!)

Granted, people visiting the site would do so because they had seen the movie, and would know that it was not actually real (so clicking Yes wouldn't really cause someone harm) - but I believe the real-life figure for such a site, if one actually existed that really did cause someone's death, would not be too far different from this.

So it would be interesting to read the blog comments on this suicide's cam page to compare the number of people who egged him on or mocked him, to the number of people who tried to stop or discourage him. I have a nasty suspicion that the killwithme.com ratio of 87:13 would not be too far out in this case...

@Sick?

You forgot all the rubbernecking that goes on every time there is any type of accident on the road. Same phenomenon. And most people have experienced that one.

Without

If people want to stop stuff like this happening, the answer doesn't have anything to do with the internet.

First of all, people need to stop getting so hysterical about suicide. In the end, it is the victims decision, and it is not often one that they've taken lightly. People don't do it "For a laugh" or assume they'll be alright afterwards.

Second of all, the medical profession needs to do a good deal more than it does to help people with depression. Giving people pills that are at best ineffective and then washing your hands of the whole thing isn't helping. Not everyone can afford counselling, and not many employers are accepting of the regular absences you require to attend it.

Re:@Ed - Guns

Agreed - if the officer had burst in with a gun and then shot the body then that would have been an overreaction but as it stands he probably hadn't been given full details of the incident. Somebody rang in saying that a teen "may" have committed suicide on camera, so the chances are that was the message the copper got.

The whole thing is very sad, but it's not the fault of the internet - as much as certain media sources with one hand in the governments pockets would try to convince you otherwise.

Suicide

I was a Samaritan for years and spent a lot of my free time listening to people die by their own hand....does that make me sick? I think not because I left due to one case which shook me up badly, a 'comfort holiday' became permanent...we all have 'the one' which will hit us. But the point is, people, set upon a course of suicide will be incredibly lonely, set on their decision and all you can do is respect that and be there, not let go alone, even if you're a complete stranger....maybe that makes it easier to confess all?

Ok some (if not all) of the watchers are sick bunnies without a doubt and maybe got some obscure form of kick out of this....it also shows how genuinely detached from reality some of these people really are doesn't it? No-one who is aware of the consequences or has any idea about real life con encourage someone to end their life....that's just sick.

However it was, as someone mentioned, what this person seemed to want.....the internet may have well been their life (as is so often the case these days with many) and it ended there too, in a way

How are we supposed to know it wasn't a stunt?

Plenty of fakers out there. Back in the days of MSN run chatrooms on IRC there would be at least one a week in the main channel threatening to off themselves. All just people wanting attention with no intention of actually joining the choir invisible. I told one the flaws in their plan and how to do it properly as not be become a drain on the NHS when they mess it up, only to be called "a sick bastard" by them.

And theres all the David Blane wannabes that will fake a death on video.

Did he give out his address? If so, how are the authorities supposed to find him? Besides a call to 911 of "I've just seen someone kill themselves on the net" would be met with confusion or 'are you sure its not fake/a recording'

um

Unless they knew the kid in person, how is a person supposed to call the authorities?

"Quick, someone on the internet is trying to kill themselves".

The better course would have been to contact the site, though there might be little they can do - who here inputs their real address and/or phone details into sites like these? You're left getting them to use the IP logged.. using a proxy? oh dear. Real IP? well you'll need to draw up a warrent for the personal details of whoever had that IP at that time.

By then the kid would be dead.

Maybe this shows a need for an emergency IP to home details function, but then you're setting a dangerous precident for the authorities to burst your door down in minutes should anyone not take a fancy to what you're doing.

The reason behind many of our feelings on this will be due to how truly helpless we are to respond to this kinda thing.

All too common...

After a cousin of mine committed suicide to the horrible things an uncle of her had done to her, the family of that uncle protected him and pretended he had done nothing wrong (even though she wasn't the first girl he had abused...).

I've been struggling with thoughts of giving up the past years (still am). Having to live with a physical condition which the doctors can't seem to put a label on which fits, yet which makes every day life quite difficult causes a lot of emotional stress and pain. Eventually one begins to see just one way out the situation. When I mentioned this on a number of forums there were indeed people who encouraged me to do it, others said I wouldn't do it, that I was just faking it, and so on. This article is therefore almost a carbon-copy of what I have experienced (minus the suicide of course, so far I haven't succeeded yet, let alone on cam).

Yet it's not just the internet... people will happily walk past someone who is getting beaten up in the middle of the street. Imagine holding a knife to your wrist while in a public place. Will anybody give you any attention, let alone help you? Doubtful.

Worst part is of course when nobody who does want to help seems able to do something. Even if this guy had lived, would he have recovered and lived on to die of a natural cause many years later? It's always tricker than it seems.