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People Are Killing Themselves Live Online!

In a “tragedy” we wish would befall the cast of MTV’s The Real World, a nineteen-year-old kid in Florida has committed suicide by overdosing on prescription pills … which might have not even made the local news were it not for the fact that he did it live, on the Internet.

Abraham Biggs, 19, was egged on by blog commenters as he overdosed in real-time on the website Justin.tv, with one saying “go ahead and do it, faggot.”

Wait … huh? What’s wrong with saying “go ahead and do it, dude.” Or our personal favorite, “Bok-bok-bok-bok, bokaaaaaaaaa!!!! Bok-bok-bok-bok, bokaaaaaaaaa!!!”

Anyway, from ABC News:

“The bloggers said that Biggs had threatened to kill himself before and had faked it, so at first they didn’t believe him,” said (medical investigator) Wendy Crane. “Gradually, as you read the blog further into the day the bloggers start commenting on how Biggs isn’t moving.”

Crane said comments on the thread included an exchange about whether the image of Biggs’ motionless body was a still photograph or a video, and eventually resulted in one of the site’s visitors calling the police, who tracked down the teen through his computer IP address.

In the Web stream, Crane said viewers saw a piece of a door frame — which had splintered from the police kicking in the teen’s bedroom door — hit Biggs, who is curled up on his bed and facing away from the camera.

“Then you see a police officer go in and check on him, and then the EMS pronounced him dead,” said Crane.

Jeez … yawn.

Some people make the world a better place by doing things like this online, other people evidently decide to leave the world in extremely boring ways.

Apparently, online suicides got their start in Japan, and they’re now beginning to catch on here in America.

Which makes them not unlike VCR’s, Playstations, HDTV’s and fuel-efficient cars.

And yes - we know we’re supposed to be “shocked and saddened” by the fact that some people are pathetic enough to kill themselves on the Internet for attention, but try as we might to muster up the requisite sympathy … we just can’t.

Perhaps it’s the libertarian streak running through us, but what people do in their own bedrooms is not for us to judge … even if that something is harmful or even fatal to themselves.

All we ask is that if they’re going to broadcast their own death to the world … the least they could do is make it interesting.

We’ve got one word for all the Internet suicide wanna-bes out there: Explosions.

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