A 21-year old Phoenix kid committed virtual and realworld suicide by ODing while chat room friends looked on via his webcam. Brandon Vedas is dead, and according to the story, at least some of the chat room participants were encouraging him to take more pills, and they watched as he died. Brandon Vedas was part of a trend that sees young people abusing prescription narcotics.
"...the technology that brought as many as a dozen chatters into the intimacy of Vedas' bedroom was unable to tell them where he was. Internet Relay Chat is anonymous, and no one in the drug users' chat group knew the last name of the young man who called himself Ripper."
One chatroom participant wrote, "That's not much," said a teenager from rural Oklahoma who calls himself Smoke2K. "Eat more. I wanna see if you survive or if you just black out."
Holy.
Vedas' mother was in the next room. She found him the next day at 1 p.m. He was dead. His computer was locked, and it took more than a week for anyone to find out the event had been witnessed, and partially at least encouraged, via webcam.
