Sunil Tripathi

Sunil Tripathi (August 14, 1990 – March or April 2013) was an American student who went missing on March 16, 2013. His disappearance received widespread media attention after he was wrongfully accused on social media as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. Tripathi had been missing for a month prior to the April 15, 2013, bombings. His body was found on April 23, after the actual bombing suspects had been officially identified and apprehended.

Sunil Tripathi
BornAugust 14, 1990
StatusBody found April 23, 2013
DiedMarch/April 2013 (aged 22)
Providence, Rhode Island
Cause of deathSuicide by drowning
Alma materBrown University
Known forWrongly accused of being one of the perpetrators of an April 15, 2013 bombing

Disappearance

Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University undergraduate student, had gone missing on March 16, 2013, having suspended his studies due to bouts of depression.[1] He had left his phone and wallet behind in his student accommodation. Known by his family as "Sunny", he was 22 years old at the time of his disappearance. The family turned to social media to assist in their search for their son, uploading a video to YouTube and setting up a Facebook page.[2] His parents were migrants from India.[3]

Misidentification

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Tripathi was one of several people misidentified as a suspect by users on social media. On April 16, 2013, one day after the bombings, a Redditor with the username "OOPS777" created a subreddit with the intention of consolidating the information surrounding the events of the bombings in an attempt to identify the culprits of the attack.[4] By Wednesday, April 17, over 3000 people had joined the subreddit in order to crowdsource the investigation of the evidence.[5] At 5:00 p.m. on April 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigations published photos of the suspects believed to be involved in the bombings.[6] Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Although this behavior violated the subreddit's rule that prohibited naming suspects without evidence, the moderators did not delete the post because they were inexperienced and struggling to cope with the influx of posts on the thread. To further the speculation behind Tripathi, a woman claiming to be his classmate tweeted that she too thought Tripathi resembled a suspect in the FBI's photographs.[7]

Soon after the release of the photos, people began trying to contact the Tripathi family, through phone calls on ABC News, as well as angry messages on Tripathi's Facebook page, dedicated to finding Sunil.[8] At 11 p.m. on the same day, the real bombing suspects (Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev) shot and killed a police officer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Department.[9] The following day at 2:45 am, a redditor Tweeted: "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi."[10] This caught the mainstream media's attention after BuzzFeed reporter Andrew Kaczynski shared a tweet that named Sunil as the primary suspect from his personal Twitter account.[11] According to the BBC, Tripathi had soon become the "standout suspect" on social media before the FBI identified the real suspects to be the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.[12] Sunil was found dead on April 23.

Reaction

The misidentification of Tripathi led to questions in the media about whether the so-called "crowd-sourced investigations" should be prevented in future, citing the harm caused to people such as the relatives of Tripathi, as well as other wrongly-identified suspects who now feared for their safety. Some argued that they are unstoppable because of the nature of the Internet, with the only hope being that awareness of the possible effects of errors such as this would lead to future caution.[12] Reddit issued a public apology for allowing its users to form a subcommunity called Find Boston Bombers, wherein they openly speculated upon suspects.[13]

Posting on Facebook, Tripathi's family described the tremendous amount of attention the misidentification had caused as painful, but they sought to use the negative publicity of the case to assist in their search by raising awareness.[12]

Discovery of death

A body was found floating in the stretch of the Seekonk River behind the Wyndham Garden Providence hotel on April 23, 2013.[14][15] Using dental records, it was confirmed to be Tripathi. The cause of death was not immediately known, but authorities said they did not suspect foul play.[16] The family later confirmed Tripathi's death was a result of suicide.[17]

In media

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,[7] completed in early 2015, is a documentary feature film. The film examines what happened during the night of the misidentification and how the story spread from social media to traditional media in the race to be first in reporting the story.[18] Told through interviews with the Tripathi family, friends, journalists and former Reddit general manager Erik Martin the film features voicemails left by journalists and family footage.

The CBS drama, The Good Wife based the episode "Whack-a-Mole" on the misidentification of Tripathi. Although the name was changed, the creator of the show researched what happened to Tripathi and based the episode around the legal ramifications that social media sites potentially face as a result of false information being disseminated.[19]

In "Boston", the season 3 premiere of the HBO series, The Newsroom, the editorial staff discuss the misidentification of Tripathi.[20]

gollark: What do you mean uniform theming? It colours them consistently.
gollark: osmarks.net is superior in that it overloads you with vast quantities of information you struggle to parse upon navigating to it.
gollark: It's not very information-dense.
gollark: Doesn't Paint have a fill tool?
gollark: It's on GEORGE.

References
  1. "Family says Sunil Tripathi showed signs depression". deccanchronicle. April 27, 2013. Retrieved 2013-04-27.
  2. Buncombe, Andrew. "Family of Sunil Tripathi - missing student wrongly linked to Boston marathon bombing - thank well-wishers for messages of support". The Independent. Archived from the original on 17 January 2015. Retrieved 17 January 2015. His family launched a search across the state of Rhode Island to try to find him and produced a video which they uploaded on to YouTube urging "Sunny" to come home.
  3. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/sunil-tripathi-missing-student-wrongly-identified-as-boston-marathon-bombing-suspect-519599
  4. "Reddit's 'Find Boston Bombers' Founder Says 'It Was a Disaster' but 'Incredible'". TheAtlantic.com. April 22, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
  5. "Reddit Wants the Boston Bomber's Blood". Vice.com. April 18, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
  6. "Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear?". New York Times. July 25, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
  7. "Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi". Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  8. "Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi - Home". Facebook. Retrieved 2019-01-14.
  9. "'It was him,' defense admits as Marathon bombing trial begins". The Boston Globe. 2015-03-04. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
  10. "#BostonBombing: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster". TheAtlantic.com. April 19, 2013. Retrieved 2017-02-03.
  11. 75. "Twitter user calls out @BuzzFeedAndrew for deleting Sunil Tripathi tweet & not "owning" the damage it caused : news". Reddit.com. Retrieved 2019-01-14.CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  12. Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong BBC News, 19 April 2013
  13. "Reddit apologises for online Boston 'witch hunt'". BBC News. April 23, 2013. Retrieved 2013-04-27.
  14. Providence police: 'very possible' that body found is Sunil Tripathi The Guardian, 24 April 2013
  15. "Body of Missing Student at Brown Is Discovered". New York Times. 2013-04-26. Archived from the original on 2015-07-15. His disappearance mystified the authorities and his family, who said they had been in daily communication with him before he left.
  16. Buncombe, Andrew. "Family of Sunil Tripathi - missing student wrongly linked to Boston marathon bombing - thank well-wishers for messages of support". The Independent. Archived from the original on 17 January 2015. Retrieved 17 January 2015. The cause of the student's death has still be determined but the medical examiner said no foul play was suspected.
  17. Nark, Jason. "The Boston bombing's forgotten victim". Philadelphia Daily News. Archived from the original on 31 October 2014. Retrieved 31 October 2014. Akhil spent the most time with Sunny before his suicide, weekends at Brown where he tried to help his youngest child foresee a future.
  18. http://articles.philly.com/2014-11-04/news/56391332_1_sunil-tripathi-tripathi-family-brown-university-student
  19. John Herman (2013-11-26). "Why Everyone In Tech Needs To Be Watching "The Good Wife"". Buzzfeed. Archived from the original on 2015-07-14. The rolling waves of online misinformation and paranoia in the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing were swift-moving and powerful; for the family of Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who went missing a month prior to the attacks, they compounded a tragedy. Rumors spread that Tripathi was involved with the bombing during the short window before the real suspects were identified, fueled in no small part by the zeal of a small group of users on Reddit. He was, in fact, deceased.
  20. Emily Yahr (2014-11-09). "'The Newsroom' premiere: Aaron Sorkin takes on dangers of the Internet, citizen journalism". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2015-10-25. It's the beginning of the end of "The Newsroom." On Sunday night, the series kicked off its third and final six-episode season with its usual premise: The ACN "News Night with Will McAvoy" team covering a major news event that occurred many months ago in real life.
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