Sunil Tripathi

Disappearance

Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University undergraduate student, had gone missing on March 16, 2013, having suspended his studies due to bouts of depression. 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.

Misidentification

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Tripathi was one of several people misidentified as a suspect by users of 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. By Wednesday, April 17, over 3000 people had joined the subreddit in order to crowdsource the investigation of the evidence. At 5:00 p.m. on April 18, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s published photos of the suspects believed to be involved in the bombings. Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after noticing a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI’s pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Though this 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 noticed the resemblance between Tripathi and the FBI’s photographs.

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. 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. The following day at 2:45 am, a redditor Tweeted: "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi." 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. According to the BBC, Tripathi had soon become the "standout suspect" in social media before the FBI identified the real suspects to be the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. 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 like the family 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. Reddit issued a public apology for allowing its users to form a subcommunity called Find Boston Bombers, wherein they openly speculated upon suspects.

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.

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. Using dental records, it was confirmed to be that of Tripathi. The cause of death was not immediately known, but authorities said they did not suspect foul play. The family later confirmed Tripathi's death was a result of suicide.

2015 documentary feature film

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi, 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. 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.

Fictionalized versions on television

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.

The HBO series, The Newsroom opened season 3 with the episode, "Boston". In the show, the editorial staff discuss the misidentification of Tripathi.