Online Suicide: How MySpace, Webcam Suicide, and Internet Chatrooms Are Changing Teenage Suicide

Suicide is nothing new: all cultures have seen some version of self killing throughout human history, but a startling new development has been seen in the last few years in which people commit suicide online. Kevin Whitrack was the first reported case of suicide online, but Suzanne Gonzales emailed her suicide note and Megan Meier killed herself after an online crush went wrong before Kevin Whitrack's committed suicide online. These online suicides, the most recent being yesterday's online suicide of a 19-year-old Florida bodybuilder, Abraham K. Biggs, are committed in front of web cams and published on the 'net for the world to see. Instead of a private act of desperation, the deaths of these people become a public spectacle. Hundreds, maybe thousands of Internet users have witnessed these online suicides.

Yesterday's online suicide was committed by Abraham Biggs, from Broward County, Florida. After announcing his intention on an online forum and posting a suicide note in another, the man overdosed on pills in front of a webcam. His final moments were broadcasted on Justin.tv. Several hours passed with the camera streaming on the motionless body of Biggs on the Justin tv website before a visitor alerted local authorities. The camera then showed the cops entering the room and attempting, unsuccessfully, to revive the man. Why did it take so long for someone to alert the authorities?

Likely, the people visiting the site didn't believe that what they were seeing was real. We are so inundated with information, see some many web hoaxes and pranks, that probably most people who came to the site thought it was some sort of performance drama, not the actual cry for help from a desperate individual. Biggs was rumored to have threatened suicide before finally ending his life online yesterday. Rather than notifying authorities, or at the very least, site administrators about the event, some viewers participated by actually encouraging the man to end his life.

Online suicide is the ultimate cry for help. How lonely a person must feel to end his or her life in the view of potentially thousands of visitors? How sad to know that this video was recording his last moments, recording for posterity his lifetime instant, and no one was sending help?

Who I really feel for is the young woman who the man claimed to not be good enough for before his suicide. How vulnerable and sad and distressed she must feel about Bigg's successful suicide attempt, committed online no less. She is not offered the anonymity of private grief. You know reporters will be calling her, emailing her, and trying to get the exclusive scoop about a tragedy she will remember for the rest of her life. Her life will be last week's new soon enough, but she will always be haunted by his death.

I should know. My best friend committed suicide when he was 19 years old. We'd talked about suicide, the two of us, even joked about it a bit, the way angst-ridden teens are prone to do. "I should just kill myself," I might say after a particularly gruesome day at work. We'd even discussed ways we might do it. I never had the guts, but he died on April 30, 2001. He didn't have MySpace, but he did frequent a lot of online chatrooms.

His was a hanging, death by leather belt, on the bathroom door facing the stairs. I wasn't the one who found him, but so many times have I thought about the fact that I could have been: He and I had lived together just a few short months before he committed suicide. The technology that exists today wasn't nearly as widespread as it is today, and for that I am thankful: for what if he had been able to record his last breaths? Would he have done it? Would he have been yet another MySpace suicide? I think he might have done.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death for those in the 15 - 24 age bracket, says the CDC, but it's not just teens who kill themselves online. More than a dozen cases have been investigated by authorities in Britain, where in March 2007, a British man named Kevin Whitrick stepped from a chair in front of a chatroom web audience and hung himself in front of the camera. Kevin Whitrick is said to be Britain's first online suicide, but he certainly wasn't the last.

The internet has been played a role in suicides for some time. In 2005, 19-year-old Suzanne Gonzales sent her loved ones an email suicide note telling them that she was dead. The teen had been a member of alt.suicide.holiday, a newsgroup that offered advice on committing suicide that her parents claimed was directly responsible for the Florida teen's death. Site members claimed not to have encouraged the girl's suicide.

Even MySpace has played a role in online suicides. Thirteen-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide in 2006 after a boy from the online social network, Myspace, broke her heart. Even more distressing is this: the Los Angeles Times reported today that the girl's neighbor, Lori Drew, 49, was directly involved in creating the MySpace account for the fictitious 16-year-old Josh Evans. Why did this woman do it? She claimed that Megan Meier, 13, had been tormenting her 18-year-old daughter. Worse yet, why did the other people who knew about the prank keep mum about it for so long?

It was actually Megan Meier's parents who begged their neighbors to keep the story quiet, reported the Boston Globe in 2007. Authorities had been unable to charge Lori Drew with a crime, a fact that outraged the public. Lori Drew has been subject to a lot of cyber harassment in the years since Meier's suicide:

"Furious neighbors - and in the wake of recent media reports, an outraged public - are taking matters into their own hands. In an outburst of virtual vigilantism, readers of blogs such as RottenNeighbor.com and hitsusa.com have listed the Drews' home address, personal phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and photos. Dozens of people allegedly have called businesses that work with the Drew family's advertising booklet company and flooded the phone lines at the local Burlington Coat Factory, where Curt Drew reportedly works." - PJ Huffstutter, Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/11/26/girls_suicide_after_online_chats_leaves_a_town_in_shock/

Perhaps the Abraham Biggs case in Florida, where online chat members reportedly encouraged the man's death, will set a new legal precedent in which people can be charged with murder for encouraging a suicide, but I doubt it. Suicide is suicide because the only person involved leaves no witnesses. As terrible as it sounds, Lori Drew had a point when she said she hadn't pulled the trigger: encouraging someone to kill himself isn't a crime. It's despicable, sure, and morally reprehensible, but it's not criminal. Charging Lori Drew with murder would be just a small step above charging a boyfriend who dumps his girlfriend for her subsequent suicide or the parents who grounds a teen who later takes that final leap. It can't be done.

We want people like Lori Drew, the alt.suicide.holiday newsgroup, and various chat room thugs to be punished, but they are not criminals. How badly I wished for someone to blame for the suicide of my dear friend, but what finally helped me come to terms with his death, and the fact that I would never laugh with him again, is recognizing that suicide, for better, for worse, for ever, was what he wanted. If there was anyone for me to rage at about the loss of his shining light, it was him, and he was gone.

I knew I had to stop beating myself up about the fact that he'd never come to me for help, or if he had, that I hadn't recognized the signs, and let him go. I could rage about the society, the world, that had beat up him, pushed him down, and trodden his light to a bare flicker, but what use was it, when all of us dies in the end? He chose his passage, that's all, just as Suzanne Gonzales, Kevin Whitrick, Megan Meier, and now Abraham K. Biggs, chose theirs. Whether or not somebody encouraged their passing is a moot point, except for the living loved one unable to let go. What's done, is done. Let them go.

Sources:

British Man Commits Suicide Online

http://www.wayodd.com/british-man-commits-suicide-online/v/6881/

Horror as Teenager Commits Suicide Online

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5203176.ece

Florida Teen Live-Streams His Suicide Online

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/MindMoodNews/story?id=6306126&page=1