While that one post (talking about suicide being the latest trend) was totalyl out of order, I do not see what else people could have done to help. He was given addresses (through URLs) for the kinds of places he had asked about, and was urged repeatedly to seek help.
It can be utterly devastating and disturbing for other members when such threats are made and *many* forums (including support forums) simply do not allow such emotional blackmail full stop. It is unfair on all other members to make such threats, especially since there is nothing they can do in real (since it is an anonymous forum), and it appears from his previous posts that he had been in a near psychotic state (he stated from a reaction to medication) for some time, and was under the care of a doctor.
However I must also say that it seems wrongplanet has been down over the weekend (which includes all of Saturday), so it may well be that he was indeed getting his support from the AS community - but when the community wasn't accessible temporarily, he couldn't cope any longer.
Also Willfreund gave people his email, and other details, and some people knew his location. All of that would be enough to attempt real life help.
That may be so but the pressure put on a community by this is enormous. I do not blame anyone who has been in touch with this user personally or had read his posts for not trying to trace him down - the user was under psychiatric care (at least he stated he was) and if that article is true, then he has written some things on WP that were simply not true (including that he had a job). I do not blame those who were familiar with this person online for anything - if someone is determined, they will carry it through regardless and he was given ample support and information when he had asked for it.
Some members do appear to have tried to contact his parents, but there were too many people of the same surname in the place he lived. Many had mailed and PMed him. Without more information (and ISPs are not that easy with dishing out information to strangers!) anything more would simply not have been possible.
I have seen before what chaos such threats can cause in a community - Tthe member in that case (ADD forum) did respond to my PMs (which I had sent after registering that his posts began to sound increasingly hostile and miserable) and reassured me he was not going to do anything to himself long before anyone on the board had twigged that his messages sounded suicidal - unfortunately he did not update them so the whole board was in chaos and overwhelming him with pleas not to kill himself etc. He had already calmed down by that point but the mass hysteria on the board seemed to have alienated him and he didn't seem to trust people any more. (I do not know if he is still a member, I had not visited that forum for ages)
I am not saying anyone is to blame, but that was it preventable by the online community as a whole, and his real life community.
I am not too sure - He was seemingly a member of at least one 'pro suicide' site and chat room, long before joining WP. Whatever was going on in his head most likely started and was made up (as in decided) before he even started posting.
The problem in cases like these is that the only people who know of such a person's intentions are people on (more or less) anonymous websites (who are in addition usually bound by confidentiality agreements - thus are by law not allowed to track someone down and forward what a person posted to their parents etc. - and only rarely have any realistic chances of being able to contact a person privately or contacting their parents).
From the sound of it, nobody in his "real life" had any idea of his gun fantasies. If a person refuses to, even when the only people [=online] who have been made aware of his plans beg them to, confide in a family member, friend or professional when they are having such disturbing thoughts, in fact tries their best to keep their feelings and plans under wraps, then secretly acquires a gun and hides it from everyone - how are the 'real life' community supposed to know that anything is wrong? Are they supposed to read their minds? Or snoop after them? (How many of us would like it if our parents secretly read our messages on here and other forums?)
It's a dilemma - the only people who knew about his potential intentions were not in a position to alert the only people who could have actually helped him.
I don't think that a forum or website is bound by law not to inform authorities if a person is thought to be in real danger of hurting themselves, and/or others. The same goes for chatrooms where a persons isp is visible to others.
I am not overly familiar with the law and do not know if there are exceptions for a breach of confidentiality and privacy in such cases, but in the UK most organisations that hold your information on a database are not allowed to just use that to track you down, or use the data you provided for anything but its stated purpose.
As far as trying to get information from the person's ISP - From what I remember even the police have in some cases had a hard time trying to extract user data from ISPs in suicide bid cases. I am not sure how forthcoming they would be in cases where it is the owner of a website trying to get private details about one of their users.
Re: IP address, I am not sure about the exact legal status but I believe there have been changes in the Internet privacy laws that mean IPs have to be hidden from the public view (only administrators of forums get to see them). I may be wrong here (I just remember someone threatening to sue the owner of a forum I was on because the owner had published PART of her IP address to announce that she had been banned and anyone with a similar IP needed to contact her) but I seem to remember looking this up a while ago because I noticed that forums suddenly did not seem to show the IP address of a poster publically any more.
I think on forums only mods can see, but in chatrooms they are publically visible in 99% of them.
Rightly so I guess - after all most chat rooms are far more anonymous than forums, an dfrom what I've heard (I never use them) people seem more inclined to post inflammatory or rude statements in chat rooms than on forum communities where they tend to know people.
An ISP cannot by law reveal customer information without a search warrant, in the UK this is covered by the data protection act. However, an IP address is not personal information - if somebody was hiding behind a proxy and paying the proxy admin to keep their real location secret it would be breach of contract for the proxy admin to reveal any information.
But in order to legally track down a person whom you believe to be in grave danger, and get their home address to alert their parents, you would need to utilise the IP address to track down the user via their ISP, right? (I might have got that wrong, but I was assuming the IP alone would not be enough to track down a person's home address)
People would not ask the isp for information, they would contact the isp and inform them of the situation and ask if the police or relatives could be notified. An isp would not give out any information to a random person who contacted them.
That is what I meant. I wouldn't be too sure they would cooperate.
Well if it was serious and evidence could be shown, such as an email, post etc, then I think they may take action. If they didn't shame on them, and its better to at least try.
I agree, but the problem is always to tell whether someone means threats or not (and going by the incoherence of his past postings, it was really not that easy to tell what he meant - one of his postings claimed he was threatened by a plastic bag - is this reason to contact his ISP to warn them he might be in danger from plastic bag related incidents?).
It is very hard for me to tell in real life whether someone is being sarcastic, making a joke or genuinely is angry or threatening me (or someone else), and on the Internet, it is even harder because of the anonymity. It becomes possible to detect changes in someone's mood over time, once I get a feel for their usual pattern of communication, and I have read others say the same.
But the user in question started out on WP apparently demanding money, and was frequently incoherent. It can be exceedingly difficult to tell whether it is necessary to intervene. In this case, not even his parents and his doctor had any clue he was going to do this - how are a bunch of people who don't even know the guy meant to know he was serious?
What I find disturbing is that he claims his parents ..." took away my "herbs" my guns and my thermite (explosive)".
If this is true then his parents knew full well just how bad things were
I do not see why he would lie. I do not have enough information to say his parents lied to the police, although its hard to imagine that they would not have known there was something wrong.
They would not have lied as such, if they had taken guns away from him they could still be telling the truth, i.e. they didn't know he had a gun in the house [because they had taken his gun(s) away].
Not much of what he wrote was very coherent, so I really cannot tell whether he was telling the truth about explosives etc. But if it is true then perhaps his parents were too ashamed to get him proper help (he did make comments that implied he was under psychiatric care but he would have probably been put in a hospital if the psychiatrist knew the truth)?
That contradiction is in fact most disturbing. Do the authorities know about his posts at wrongplanet?
I believe the administration forwarded the information to someone (not sure who) and a member claims to have forwarded his posts to new stations.
Although thermite can be explosive in some circumstances, like flour. It has a very high boiling point and so is liquid when it reacts with it self. Its main use was welding rail tracks. It would not by most be considered explosive. I find it odd that he called thermite an explosive. But it is not enough to suggest that he did not have it.
What worries me most is that he said his parents took his guns away.
However, another shocking thought was that he might have been talking about pretend (laser) guns.... and that, had they not been taken away, he wouldn't have done this for real. He explicitly stated in the Halloween-related post that he was only going to pretend to shoot some kids, to scare them, if they came and tried to destroy his pumpkin (presumably he was talking about his parents' Halloween decoration). The shotgun, at least in this post, was only mentioned as a defense in case they had more 'drive-by shootings' (do they have those in such areas?).
And I really think that anyone who has not read all of Will's posts on WP, and can honestly hand on heart say they were not biased by hindsight, should shut the h*ll up about blaming the administration and making it out like he made clear-cut statements.
The user willfreund1 started out with a thread called "Suicide Threat" in which he announced his plans to blackmail many different forums (and he was a member here too....) by pretending to kill himself.
That was pretty much the first thing he posted there. Aside from it being nigh on impossible to track him down with legal methods (and countless people tried!), do you REALLY honestly believe a few incoherent ramblings like those were enough to try and 'alert' someone? Genuinely?
Aside from that - He also made posts stating that suicide wasn't on his list of options any more.
He said he was gonna do damage with the shotgun, but he also said he was gonna use it as defense if they had a drive-by shooting. As mentioned above, the only mention of Halloween is that he was gonna scare the kids who attacked the decorations, with a laser gun. Not shoot anyone with a real gun!
He was anything but coherent and went back and forth between trying to extort money out of the forum users by threatening to kill himself, and calming down and being more reasonable and acting like he had been joking - as Amy said hindsight can skew your views, it's only knowing what he ended up doing that makes you see this "clearly" announced in snippets of his writing!
On wrongplanet they have an 11-page thread about this. Noetic - are you saying that they are allowed to discuss what happened and people here aren't allowed to discuss it and give opinions?
No, not at all. Just that it is easy to read selected bits of what he wrote on WP and say "It was obvious he was going to do this" because of what you know now.
But if you read through ALL of what he wrote there, in the same order that members [who were reading his messages at the time] and the administration did, it is anything but clear. Yes, he did allude to some of the things he ended up doing. But the crucial point I was trying to make (and obviously failed!) was that there was just as much other stuff he wrote that contradicted these indications*.
So which ones would you have believed? And how would you know what was genuine and what wasn't?
It is only because you already know what happened that it seems quite as 'obvious' and 'clear-cut'.
* For example that he announced he was merely going to scare people, dress up and use a laser 'gun' to scare the kids who damaged his parents' Halloween display. Perhaps a sentiment many people would share, since vandalism is very frustrating!
They posted the chatlogs? :shock: how is publically showing the chatlogs supposed to help the case?
It was actually individual members who posted them. Which I found a bit disturbing - why did they keep them?
In so many cases of this kind, it's almost as though there were a secret policy to ignore the cry for help until the inquest!
Stella