Wrongly accused suicide victim

Jason Laughlin has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a rush to judgement:

For more than five weeks, the family of Sunil Tripathi (photo) of Radnor, Pennsylvania mobilized a massive effort to find him. The Internet was a major resource. Family posted videos pleading for the Brown University student to come home. Social networks spread the word about the missing 22-year-old, but then, in a matter of hours, they became the medium by which Tripathi was falsely identified as one of the terrorists responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings.
A new documentary, Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi, shows how old and new media's quest to be first with information wrongly accused an innocent man and created a nightmare for Tripathi's family. But the film is about more than media malpractice. It seeks to show who Tripathi really was, and spotlights the depression that led him to take his own life a month before the bombing took place.
"I felt like, as I was approaching this film, in order to tell the story, we have to know who Sunil is," director Neal Broffman said. "Enough was said about him that was not true the night of the misidentification." Broffman said he and his wife, Elisa Gambino, the film's producer, became interested in the case of mistaken identity and media frenzy after befriending Tripathi's older sister Sangeeta while working on a film for Johnson & Johnson in Africa. Sangeeta Tripathi stayed in contact with the couple, and they helped the Tripathi family by editing videos begging the missing student to return.
Broffman began filming at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania memorial service in June of 2013, and finished the documentary in September of 2014. The quarter-million dollar film has been submitted to numerous festivals, including Sundance and Tribeca. The filmmakers expect to hear in December of 2014 whether it has been accepted. They are also seeking a distributor. More information and a trailer are available at helpusfindsuniltripathi.com.
False rumors about Tripathi began when users on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook noted he resembled a picture of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect. That observation cascaded into suspicion, and then a stream of furious and sometimes racist messages. Reddit users posted that police mentioned Tripathi as a suspect over a scanner, though the filmmakers could find no evidence that police ever said that. Commenters called Tripathi a Communist and al-Qaeda, and included threats like "we need to find this guy and beat him repeatedly." Broffman himself received an email accusing him of being a terrorist.
Like a virus, the bad information spread to national media outlets. The Tripathi family, desperate to hear from Sunny, instead received more than fifty calls in one night from reporters asking them to comment about rumors that their loved one was a terrorist.
"I was very upset by what happened, by the misidentification, by how the journalists behaved, by how people behaved online," said Broffman, who worked as a CNN editor and videographer for twelve years.
The film concludes with facts about mental illness. Title cards state that millions of people worldwide suffer from depression, and that suicide is the second leading cause of death among males ages fifteen to thirty.
The signs of Tripathi's illness were obvious. His grades fell, and his interest in music waned, family said. He took a leave from school, but wanted to remain in Providence, Rhode Island. He could cope without medication, he said, and told his family he would never harm himself. "The thought of him ending his life," Tripathi's mother, Judy, said this week, "if you had told me that could happen, I would say no."
Members of the Tripathi family participated in the documentary to highlight who their relative was and the pain depression caused him. They have seen the movie, and seek to screen it locally in 2015.
Tripathi's mother said that family members knew her son was hurting and talked to him constantly about getting help, but were afraid that, if they pushed too hard, he would wall them out or run away. She thinks he could have been saved if he had been taking antidepressants, but he disliked consuming any artificial substances, and may have been embarrassed by his condition. "Mental illness is an illness and should be regarded without any discrimination or judgment," she said.

Rico says it's too bad the kid killed himself, and worse that he was falsely accused...