Fla. Teen Commits Suicide With Live Web Audience A new low for the internet

[Echo_of_thunder 1]

MIAMI – A college student committed suicide by taking a drug overdose in front of a live webcam as some computer users egged him on, others tried to talk him out of it, and another messaged OMG in horror when it became clear it was no joke. Some watchers contacted the Web site to notify police, but by the time officers entered Abraham Biggs' home — a scene also captured on the Internet — it was too late.

Biggs, a 19-year-old Broward College student who suffered from what his family said was bipolar disorder, or manic depression, lay dead on his bed in his father's Pembroke Pines house Wednesday afternoon, the camera still running 12 hours after Biggs announced his intentions online around 3 a.m.

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http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

When I opened my yahoo and saw this, it honest to god made me sick. The internet has hit a new low here. Here we all come to the world wide web to learn and enjoy ourselfs and some troubled teen kills himself as people watch and Egg him on! I just hope that this will shut down some of these sites such as Justin TV. Bad enough that everywhere you turn you have pedifiles searching myspace,friendster and all the others. Now this?

Im sorry and maybe this should had been placed in vent. But It really Pisses me off that this 19 year old had to go and end his live for what? So others could watch.

[Plenoptic 0]

That is truly ridiculous and stupid. There is no reason for one to kill himself, let alone in public over the internet. The people watching should have at least reported the suspicious activity not knowing whether it was real or not. I wonder how they could even bare to watch that stuff, just the thought of it gives me chills running down my spine. That teenager must have had some severe problems in his life or something to have the desire to kill himself like that, bipolar or not people should just not wish to be that way.

[anwiii 17]

hmmm...well, let's all welcome real life to the net now. i haven't seen anything about it or read the article posted.......but come on people! this is real life. what. it's sickening because real life is now public? or real life was witnessed by others? or someone wanted others to witness real life? real life is happening all around us whether we hear or see it or not.no, he shouldn't have killed himself. no, he shouldn't have done it in front of people. i don't blame HIM though. i blame the people who egged him on. what makes ME sick is the reaction of others to real life. like real life shouldn't happen. like we should be living in a perfect world. reason why the reaction makes me sick is it creates an avoidance of the issues.avoidance of the issues are important because when this happens again, and it will because there will now be others to follow....people will have the same reaction which has nothing to do with helping the issues here.if i had a choice between not watching or watching, i would WATCH because at least i have an opportunity to talk to this person and possibly talk him out of it. so now let me explain someting to everyone. this dude made it public. people will have a bad reaction to this and these people are ignorant. this dude was reaching out. he waited to kill himself. he was egged on. a person ready to die and willing to die will not reach out and will not tell anyone. there are signs of those that are serious.....like giving their possesions away without reason or cause, etc....but they give no direct warning. this guy evidently did and he was egged on to do what he did. THAT makes me sick too. not his actions....but other peoples actions.all this guy needed was some positive guidance and he didn't get it. se la vi. he just commited one of the worse acts he could have ever done for himself. some may want to blame the bi polar or manic phase but that's not why he killed himself. there are alot of people who are bi polar and manic depressive who DONT kill themselves. another distraction to the issues that people want to bring up.now he just started a chain reaction to people doing this in the future.....and in my opinion, it wasn't HIS fault!!!!!!!!!!

[Saint_Michael 3]

100% agree with you on that anwii, but I would say that small part of him being bi-polar and with a little encouragement of some murderers was why he did it. As for what happens now, no one is going to, the website will get away with a minor slap on the wrist and that's about it. This just shows you how evil people are in this horrible world and I hope the guilt of killing someone and watching him die haunts them for the rest of their lives and they do the same cowardly act as well because the punishment fits the crime for what they did to him.

[electriic ink 1]

The internet has hit a new low here. Here we all come to the world wide web to learn and enjoy ourselfs and some troubled teen kills himself as people watch and Egg him on!

Yeah but they thought it was a joke and I'll be honest, if someone I didn't know told me they were going to kill themselves in front of me, I'd think it was a joke too.

I just hope that this will shut down some of these sites such as Justin TV. Bad enough that everywhere you turn you have pedifiles searching myspace,friendster and all the others. Now this?

That's a bit extreme.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I find this very disturbing, to say the least...Unless he did make it sound like a joke when he was talking about doing it. Maybe the people who were "egging him on" were doing it because they thought he just wanted to get a reaction out of them?Either way, if he killed himself he was going to do it whether offline or online, alone or with friends. So I don't feel that the online part had anything to do with it. I still find it stupid to kill yourself though.

[Lyon2 0]

That is really the kind of news that i do not need to hear, tos ee nor to talk about, the exception is perhaps the reason that made the kid kill himself, which was perhaps the fact of him beeing bi-polar, which is a decease i know much about, i have a friend and a brother which have it, and it requires medication, specific medication, and continuous/non stop medication for a lif time.Bi-polar decease can touch/happen to anyone, and that is not good news at all when it happens, and the eefects could appear later, so that is why we should go to the doctor/hospital, even if we do not like it at all, it is a must in serious cases.I am sad to know that, like i have been saying, theis new generation of kids are very troubled, and they want to grow up to fast, well, i sure hope this kind of tragic events do not happen anymore, i really hope, the ones that will suffer are the ones that stay behind, which in this case are his parents, which they will suffer a lot, and the rest of the family, perhaps brothers/sisters, if his has of course.

Edited November 22, 2008 by Lyon2 (see edit history)

[HappyHippie 0]

Well I also saw and read the article that day on Yahoo's top stories. I for one dont agree with it I dont like suicide and to be done like that in public well just turns my stomach. And as far as the people who egged him on I think they should be ashamed of themselfs they could have prevented this they could have notified police or any kind of authorities to try to get this stopped. Anyway I have nothing more to say about it the whole thing just makes me sick. I worry about my kids on the pc watching something like that.

[anwiii 17]

well now you know better, don't you.

you know tis reminds me of one of my philosphies in life and why i trust and believe in people. people have told me some crazy stuff in the past that is hard to believe. well, i believe and trust even if it's extreme. why? because what if they are telling the truth? i am not one to ever take that chance. yea, i get hurt trusting and believing some people, but when it really matters, at least they have my support.

and think of it this way. it's just as easy to take someone serious as it is to laugh in their face

Yeah but they thought it was a joke and I'll be honest, if someone I didn't know told me they were going to kill themselves in front of me, I'd think it was a joke too.

[Mr Inviso 0]

Suicide seems to be a permanent answer to a temporary situation. I believe this because my brother killed himself a few hours before his lawyer called saying that he would be cleared of a crime he didn't commit. I'm upset with Yahoo for posting this story. As far as I'm concerned they are telling people killing your self is an answer to your problems.

[varalu 0]

Biggs, a 19-year-old Broward College student who suffered from what his family said was bipolar disorder, or manic depression, lay dead on his bed in his father's Pembroke Pines house Wednesday afternoon, the camera still running 12 hours after Biggs announced his intentions online around 3 a.m.
See full story
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

When I opened my yahoo and saw this, it honest to god made me sick. The internet has hit a new low here. Here we all come to the world wide web to learn and enjoy ourselfs and some troubled teen kills himself as people watch and Egg him on! I just hope that this will shut down some of these sites such as Justin TV. Bad enough that everywhere you turn you have pedifiles searching myspace,friendster and all the others. Now this?

Im sorry and maybe this should had been placed in vent. But It really Pisses me off that this 19 year old had to go and end his live for what? So others could watch.

This is madness.
This news is allover the web and kind of sending waves.
Why the hell is this happening and why the hell he has to commit suicide with audience? - Crazy.!!

[enhu 0]

He must be expecting those people in chatrooms would actually tell him not to do it. Nooo.teen these days laugh to see every jackass being beaten. infact most kid today or maybe, notice it that they like to see friends geting hurt. try searching JACKASS in youtube. If he think he needs help, go call a pyschaitrist. Not those who will cheer up and laugh for diong it.

[adriantc 0]

As somebody said in here the Internet has just hit an all time low... I guess this story tells a lot about the values of people - we should consider this a harsh lesson... And I don't think the website is the first to be blamed here, but it's users. What kind of conscious would you have to watch somebody dieing live. I'm sure most of them though it was a sick joke, but somebody should have called the authorities after his first announcement. If it would have been a joke nobody would have been harmed and he would have only received a fine; instead nobody called until it was too late and the result was tragic.What I fail to understand is why society does not help people with mental problems? Everybody says his sorry he died, but nobody really cares. In some ways those close to him are just as guilty as those who watched that live feed. There must come a time when society reassess it's values and put human life above all other. It's a sad story, but it just shows how low we've come in our so called "civilization".

[niklophiliac 0]

Shocking man!! And really sad as well that a huge number of people watching the disaster could not do anything to prevent the mishap or help out.Not to mention the fact that people watching were actually egging the teen on - cmon man even if it was a joke i doubt I would ever try to coax someone into committing suicide let alone watch the entire episode. It is very disturbing to see people take pleasure from such idiotic deeds by crazed individuals. Hopefully something like this will be averted in future and internet will be slightly more regulated to an extent that people can take action more quickly if they believe that something wrong is taking place.

[rayzoredge 2]

This is not shocking, not new for the Internet, and definitely not unexpected.There is an imageboard/forum that I'm sure a handful of us may be familiar with that subjects this kind of material just about every day, not to mention that it is a very common reply to a newbie to any forum on the Internet.People kill themselves every day, for one reason or another. A lot of younger folks threaten suicide for attention, and then there is a portion of that lot that actually are willing to push that limit. Usually the folks that threaten with it to receive attention would do it on a wide-scale medium, like the Internet in this case, so I'm sure that even the part of the audience that was joking didn't take his threat seriously. But it would probably be surprising to know for a lot of us that people show the lowest standards of humanity while they stay anonymous behind a computer monitor on the Internet. Just look at YouTube comments. And forum posts in flaming threads. It's amazing what gumption people will muster when they know that no one knows who they are.The imageboard/forum that I talked about earlier earned its nickname of being the "*ssh*l* of the Internet" because it promotes anonymity with its participants... with no membership, no information, not even a name required to post content onto the forum. Everyone is Anonymous. And I'm sure it's starting to click with some more Internet-savvy folk why Anonymous is an Internet meme.I think that this kind of thing desensitizes people. It's easy to see how people become less caring for human life when we're constantly bombarded on the news with numbers, casualties, environmental disasters, and criminal activity. A murder here and there doesn't even faze us... it just commands a sort of "mandatory response" like "Oh my word" just to add to the supposed drama of the situation at hand. Do you really care about all of the kids that perish from malnutrition, the people that lose their homes and lives to the latest floods, the murder that happened in a city miles away from your home? That's something that we can all ask ourselves when we catch ourselves "feeling sympathy." Is it really sympathy, or is it the expected response that we've literally trained ourselves to reply with when confronted with a matter that doesn't deal with ourselves?This teenager is one of many that will undergo depressive cycles, or become a victim of a supposed mental condition, or whatever. Are we going to be equally shocked to hear about the suicides that we DON'T hear about? Television does a pretty good job of blowing things out of proportion, doesn't it? While we throw out "grievances" towards this one incident, many others will die unbeknownst to us... with the "war" in Iraq, the epidemics in third world countries, even the situations like poverty, lack of heat, or anything else that we've put ourselves into in the "good 'ol USA."I guess what I'm trying to say is that this kind of stuff is not new, especially with an audience goading a particular someone to go kill themselves with no inclination of actually facing that reality if and when it does happen. It's been on the Internet and will probably always be on the Internet... along with all the other horrible things that people say under the protection of anonymity.