The saddest thing is it could have been prevented. His suicide note got posted to his blog early, and linked to from here. I (and I think other people too) ran a whois on his domain, found his address, and reported it to his local police department. I’d have done more, but was somewhat limited by being many thousand miles away. Presumably the police were unwilling/unable to act on reports by email from another country :-/
I called them by phone, from a different state in the U.S. They didn’t promise me anything (for all they or I knew, it was a hoax, or maybe an out-of-date whois), but I got the impression they were taking it seriously. But there are limits to what the police can do to people who have not committed a crime and aren’t obviously and immediately dangerous to themselves or others.
Reading this made me cry, because I suspect we are very similar, with only slightly different circumstances. I wish I could have saved him. I wonder if I could have saved him.
The saddest thing is it could have been prevented. His suicide note got posted to his blog early, and linked to from here. I (and I think other people too) ran a whois on his domain, found his address, and reported it to his local police department. I’d have done more, but was somewhat limited by being many thousand miles away. Presumably the police were unwilling/unable to act on reports by email from another country :-/
I called them by phone, from a different state in the U.S. They didn’t promise me anything (for all they or I knew, it was a hoax, or maybe an out-of-date whois), but I got the impression they were taking it seriously. But there are limits to what the police can do to people who have not committed a crime and aren’t obviously and immediately dangerous to themselves or others.
Was that true in this case? The post on suicide dates from 2009.
But this one is from less than two months ago.
Reading this made me cry, because I suspect we are very similar, with only slightly different circumstances. I wish I could have saved him. I wonder if I could have saved him.
Yep, that’s the one to which I was referring. It was brought up at http://lesswrong.com/lw/4u6/suicide_note_of_an_lw_user/