Endless Thread - Help Us Remember Sunil Tripathi

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

In the days after the 2013 Boston bombing, an online hunt for the perpetrators falsely accused Brown University student Sunil Tripathi. Police later discovered that Tripathi, who had been showing signs of depression, had died by suicide. Endless Thread revisits his story — one of family and mental health — on the 10th anniversary with documentarian Neal Broffman and Tripathi's sister, Sangeeta Tripathi. Editor’s note: This story mentions suicide. You can reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline toll-free by calling or texting 988. ***** Credits: This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson are the co-hosts.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Heads up, this episode mentions suicide. If you're having suicidal thoughts yourself and you just need someone to talk to, the suicide and crisis lifeline is 988. Okay, here's the show. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, it's been a, it's, this, this episode is a long time coming. Yeah, man, ever since we launched the show, five, years ago, we have wanted to make an episode that talks about the Boston Marathon

bombing. And here we are, 23, 10 years. Where were you when this happened, Amory? I was not living in Boston. I was living in New York, but where were you? I was living in Boston, and I was working on the daily local news show at WBUR called Radio Boston. And I remember the executive producer coming into the studio at 255 p.m. Because our show went live at 3 p.m. And I'm pretty sure the first bomb went off at about 250. We were told to turn on the little TV in the studio and all you saw was a cloud of smoke.

And that week, I remember that week, we were all there 12 plus hour days. and the interesting thing, Ben, is that the story that we're going to talk about today was not even on my radar for a long time, because this story has to do with misinformation. I think it's a good moment to reflect on this kind of manhunt that started on Reddit for the people who committed this act of terrorism. You know, when this happened 10 years ago, it felt really like a new time for the spread of information on the internet. I think a lot of people were sort of consuming the information that they could via the internet.

And I was among those people. I was poking around seeing what was what and trying to figure out what was really happening. And I actually remember sort of realizing and watching a little bit of the huge, kind of crowdsource effort to solve the mystery of who the suspects were. And I remember a little bit about how that all went sideways. If you, like I, was not aware, there was a Brown University student named Sunil Tripathi, who had gone missing about a month before the marathon. And on social media, people started spreading the idea that maybe this student, Sunil,

was one of the Boston Marathon bombers. And they were comparing photos of him with the grainy surveillance photos of, quote, suspect number two that the FBI had released during a press conference a few days after the bombing. Sunil was not suspect number two.

We'd learn less than 24 hours later that that was Jahar Sarnayev. But the torment that this false accusation caused the family and friends of Sunil would go on to shine a light on the dangers of online vigilantism fueled by misinformation. So we talked to Neil Broffman. He's a filmmaker who took on that story in his 2015 documentary,

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi. Sunil was the youngest of three siblings, the Tripathi family, lives outside Philadelphia. He followed in his older sister, Sangida, and older brother Ravi's footsteps to Brown University, played saxophone and did well in school. And he was just a normal kid who was off to his university. While he was in school, he started to show signs of depression,

which became more pronounced as the months went by and the years went by. And by the time of his junior year, he took a leave of absence from the university. So Sunil went missing in March of 2013. Can you describe kind of what was happening in his life leading up to the disappearance? Sunil took a leave of absence his junior year and was living in an apartment in a house off campus. People, his family would go and visit him and talk to him. But he became very withdrawn and became more and more isolated until March 6th. 16th, which is the day that he went missing from his apartment. His family found out that he was

missing and they drove up to Providence and started to organize friends and schoolmates and anyone they could get to come and help them as they launched this very impressive search using social media, reaching out to the local press, leafleting, going around, visiting places, homeless shelters, talking to people all in their, you know, in their search. for Sunil. So there's an irony here, too, which is that Sunil himself was a really private person. But as your documentary explains, you know, he disappears and his family turns to social media and turns this into a very public effort. So how did they decide to take this really public approach?

I think the family did what any family would do and what any family would feel compelled to do. They're not big social media. But this was a tool that they had at their disposal. And so they started their Facebook page, Help Us Find Sinil Trapathy, and would put up photographs and notes of encouragement and appeals to people in hopes that someone would see it in the Boston area, in the Greater Providence area,

to try to get his name and his face in front of as many people as possible. It's interesting to think that back to that time and how different it was when people were thinking and talking about social media. It was a very innocent time in social media, which created, you know, the foundation for what happened later. The family's search for Sunil was, sounds like it was pretty relentless of, you know, walking the Providence River, hanging up posters, just managing everything on social media. But the day of the marathon, Sonny's brother and sister, took a day off from that. They went. They decided that they had a friend who was running in the marathon. They had been looking for Sunil for almost exactly a month.

He went missing on March 16th, and the marathon was April 15th. So they decided they just wanted to have a break. You know, it was an incredibly intense, emotional period of time. time for them. So they went to the marathon to watch their friend, and then the bombing happened. We're interrupting your program because there have been two explosions today at the Boston marathon. Two explosions near the finish line just a short while ago. What was the seed, would you say, that would eventually kind of grow and bind Sunny's story with the Boston bombing? What was the sort of beginning of that? There was a young woman who went to high school with Sunil.

and she saw the photograph of suspect number two. And I imagine perhaps was looking at other things that people were talking about because she jumped into this conversation and said, you know, I'm a little bit freaked out right now. This, you know, the suspect two looks like this kid near me who's been missing. And then that gets going. And you have other people saying, you know, oh, well, Cammy Madioli said this. and now you've got other people adding their thoughts to it until it comes back.

And she says it was Sunil. And then it really just exploded from there. One of the commenters at the time, you know, said this, and this was a Reddit comment, I think, this is probably just the beginning of modern digital witch hunting. Yeah, that was an incredible observation. And other people, you know, there were people who were trying to rein people in to say, hey, hold on a minute. People are innocent here.

Let's not ruin people's lives. But it just descended into the darkest, you know, places of horrible racist comments and attacks against the family. You know, the family was receiving comments on their Facebook page. And this thing just really went out of control to the point where, you know, the journalists now start to pay attention. Hi, thank you. My name is Hunker Walker. I'm a reporter with Talking Points Memo. The Boston Police scanner has identified your brother as a potential suspect in the marathon bombing, and these reports are starting to spread. Yeah, it's really interesting to, as a journalist, watch this kind of almost from the other side and witness the family kind of receiving all of these voices. messages and these phone calls. How do you think about the role of the media and your own role in telling the family story?

When I learned about what the family had gone through, I was less surprised about the social media attacks and the comments that people were making. But I was really appalled at the behavior of the journalists. And as a journalist, I've been a journalist for 30 years. years, I was just disgusted with the behavior that they exhibited. And the phone calls that we hear in the film, I think, are just damning. Hi, this is Judy Thompson with CNN. I would be so great to call that. This is Robin Mazzoli at Bloomberg News. Hi, my name is. No one. The L.R. reporter would be Boston. Julie, this is Richard Murphy. I'm calling you from the Associated Press in Boston. We're wondering if you've heard anything new about funny.

There's a lot of police action in the Boston area, and someone has suggested that it might be connected to. I don't believe that journalists should call families based on things that are happening in Twitter. And then it gets worse, where we have Luke Russert from NBC. You know, he talked about how this is a triumph of new media. And then you've got reporters for Australian television going on the air saying his name. Do have some names for you, some names to match those faces that the FBI gave us a little earlier.

The first one, his name is Sunil Tripathi. And then when Sunil's true fate was discovered, they went back and said, here, you remember that guy who we all said was the Boston bomber? and, well, it turns out he's not, and here's, you know, so now he became a story. So yet another cycle of Sunil Tripathi in the same mention as the Boston Marathon. And so my motivation in making this film was to, one, show the consequences of unethical behavior by journalists, and two, to learn about who he really was and what this family had gone through. About a week after the marathon bombing, Sunil's body was recovered from the Providence River. He had died by suicide.

Reddit, like any other social media platform, people congregate in these chat rooms. And somebody set up the subreddit of, you know, let's find the Boston bomber. And when it started to get really big, Reddit shut the subreddit down. And my problem was, you know, if we look at it, from a sociological standpoint, people would never speak to each other the way people speak at each other in social media, especially during times of crisis. And even now, I mean, it's just so naive to say because all we have to do is look at Twitter and today, and it's a, you know, it's a cesspool of language and attack and hatred. A family friend of the Tripathies says,

something along the lines of what I like about social media and what I don't like about it is that it can't be controlled. And that makes a lot of sense, but it also makes it harder to identify clear takeaways from the social media hunt for suspect to you. And it probably makes it easier for social media companies to not take a certain amount of responsibility or to change policies that might help prevent something like this in the future. Do you feel like what happened to Sunny could happen on social media again, you know, 10 years later? I mean, is it more common now? Is it, you know, how do you think about this now?

I think, Ben, that it absolutely could happen, and it does happen. I mean, there was a, with the murders in Idaho, there was an article I saw in the Washington Post a couple of days ago about just this thing. And so, yeah, it happens. The sad part is that I think it happens on a daily basis in lots and lots and lots of smaller ways. You also interviewed the former general manager of Reddit, Eric Martin. Was it sort of a dance getting someone from Reddit to agree to talk to you about this? Or how did that go?

Eric is a wonderful guy. And he really, he was really broken up about what happened. And he reached out to the family and apologized. He's like one of the only people who apologized to the family, someone who was in a key place. And he apologized to the family. And so we had his contact info from the Tripathies. And we got in touch with them. And he said, sure, absolutely.

I'm happy to sit down and talk. And so we went up to visit him in Brooklyn and did the interview that you see in the film. I don't think Reddit was responsible for everything that happened. but we have a responsibility and we, you know, yeah, we could have, you know, maybe there are things we could have done that would have stopped or limited or changed the situation. And Eric spent a lot of time, I think, beating himself up about the things that he could have done. And I don't know if he ever came up with any answers. One of the biggest things that our team discussed after our conversation with Neil was journalistic responsibility in a breaking news situation. Ultimately, our job as journalists is to find and communicate the truth, responsibly and accurately, and hopefully kindly.

And sometimes that job can mean cold calls to people who are going through stuff in the hopes of finding the right facts. And sometimes that job is messy. So we wanted to acknowledge that journalists don't always go about that job in the right way, and that we should all remember the human in the work that we're going to. we do. Coming up, we talk to Sunil's older sister, Sengita Tripathi. We'll be right back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bucks. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you

the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. In the days after the Boston Marathon bombing, the search for the attackers was frenetic. Online, there were thousands of comments and theories, and the false accusation of Sunil

Tripathi would ultimately change the online story of his life. And it would take a significant emotional toll on his family. So 10 years later, we reached out to Sunil's older sister, Sungita, and she spoke with us from her home in Oakland, California. So I grew up with my two brothers, Ravi, my middle brother, and Sunil, my baby brother, who was eight years younger than me. When we were kind of growing up, we would fall asleep watching movies lying on the carpet in our living room. And then, of course, somebody would wake up, and we'd realize that the TV was still on, and it was 2 or 3 a.m. and we would all go upstairs to bed. And he would often be the one who would wake up and he would come over and he'd say, saying,

you know, it's time to go upstairs, go to sleep. And I was the cranky teenager that I was. So I said, Sonny, can you give me five minutes? Can I snooze? And he would go upstairs and do something for five minutes at two or three a.m. And come back down and wake me again. And I just, the patience and the love that existed in my little brother to do that. is sort of beyond me.

When I remember that, I just smile. Oh, that's great. I guess I wonder if this time of year, every year, stirs up things for you. Obviously, we're coming up to what is the 10th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing and, you know, have passed 10 years' anniversary since your brother died. How are you kind of thinking about this 10-year mark?

We every year sort of get together in silence and celebrate and remember my brother on the day that he went missing, which was actually, as we learned later, the day that he passed away. And this whole time every year is a really somber season. We get together these days on Zoom with family and friends, what we call chosen family, and try to talk about how we're doing now. also about Sumil's life, but it's also a time where I remember his death. I feel like we hear stories when we talk about the power and potential of the internet and of social media in particular, we hear stories usually on opposite size of the spectrum. Like, wow, the internet is this beautiful, vast place where we can connect and get 100,000 people or hundreds of thousands of people behind an initiative.

but it can also be an incredibly grim and frustrating and heartbreaking place. And I feel like this story holds both of those truths about the Internet. And it makes it hard to know what conclusion to draw all of the time. Well, there were so many hard parts about the search for my brother. But one thing that I found particularly hard was walking up to strangers and over and over telling the story. of my brother's mental health and of the search for him. And one thing that was so powerful is almost every single person, there's a silence for about three seconds.

And then someone says, oh my gosh, my uncle, my cousin, my wife, my neighbor also struggles. And the level of solidarity and kindness and love that was generated with strangers, was just absolutely remarkable and tragic also to think of how many people are affected by mental health. When you're on the internet, that interaction's a little bit different. People are touched, people are affected, but again, you're still strangers in this other way. And I think, as you mentioned, that can be both very powerful and can also be very dangerous. Do you remember how you first found out that Sunil had been named incorrectly as potentially one of the, suspects that the FBI were looking for with regards to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Yeah. As you know, we had this very active Facebook page that the purpose of it was to get people to see Sunil's photo and to share any information if they've seen him. And we started getting some posts on our Facebook feed that were funny and confusing. And we didn't really have context. And then we started, I think, going on the Internet. and Googling like what's happening just like everyone else. And we ran into the Reddit mess that was emerging that night.

And so we knew at that point that something was going on. We didn't really realize the magnitude of what was going on until I received, gosh, over 75 calls from media throughout that night of people who started very gently saying, oh, Sunil is a person of interest to, oh, Sunil is. you know, involved in the horrible tragedy that happened. How did your family spring into action when you start seeing these comments? Or was there a conversation kind of like, all right, this is happening? What do we do?

How do we get through this as a family? The thing that was on all of our minds is, you know, what is the impact on Sunil? You know, we still were hoping that he was alive and that he was somewhere and that he might even be hearing these awful things about him already not being in a good state. So we worked together. We made some quick decisions. And then the next morning, things had blown over in the sense that the correct person was identified. And that was a really hard moment for our family to decide what are we going to do next. And at that point, my living brother, Ravi and I were very clear that we have to go back to that same media that was saying awful things in the middle of the night.

and ask them for interviews and get on those shows and talk about our brother who is still missing. And I remember that being a really tough moment to realize the same people, the same systems that can be quite dangerous, are the systems that we're reliant on to look for our brother. And so that was a very fast and difficult turnaround for us. Were there ever any physical threats of harm or, you know, intimidation moves made against your family by any of the kind of commenters on social media that you were seeing? Claiming that my brother was involved is actually a threat of harm is harm because of my brother's mental state. And I'm so glad in certain ways that my brother was not alive because I don't, I don't know what the impact on him would have been. I feel like there could be many

takeaways from all of this. And there are some that are takeaways specifically for. for people who might feel tempted to, you know, post things on social media. And there are also takeaways for journalists. And I wonder what those are for you. The thing that made me so upset and heartbroken hearing journalists jump onto the bandwagon of social media is I was very naive in thinking that there was a firewall between somebody in a hoodie, you know, who's blogging on social media and a professional journalist. And what I found was that there wasn't. And so I think that there should be a much higher bar

of research and professionalism around what is shared in a journalistic space and that journalists have an incredible amount of power in terms of what they communicate. And the pressure to get the story can be very, very harmful if not taken seriously. For social media, for all of us, for everyone who's on the internet, you know, I think my biggest takeaway is how do we use the internet for good, for connection, for support, for meaning, without forgetting that there's another human being

on the other side of that chat. So my dream is that somehow there would be like a button before you could click send that says, hello, there's a person on the other end of the line. Does this, is this something you would say to your friend face to face? But of course, that's not the nature of social media. Has this experience really changed your approach to social media? I was not a big social media person before the search for my brother and definitely was not after.

I am very tender and aware of the power, both for good and for incredible harm. Yeah. Ten years later, how are you? doing? How is the rest of your family doing? As everybody who's lost somebody knows, there are holes that are in our hearts and our spirits that never get healed. Time passes and new things happen, but my entire family and I still have a big Sunil-shaped hole in our heart. The fact that he died by suicide, the fact that there was so much tragedy at the end of his life in some ways makes it even more sad. But we carry, I carry, I carry.

you know, his loss in my life constantly. I have a young child now and, you know, think constantly about that he'll never know his uncle, Sunil, and that there's so much life that he didn't get to live. So we, you know, part of why we continue to speak out as a family is try to use the painful and hard story of my brother's life to normalize and to talk about mental health so that other families, ideally can get the support they need and other kids can live. Sengita, thank you so much for taking time to share more about your brother. You're welcome. We invited someone from Reddit to join us for this episode, since Eric Martin, whom we heard

from in Neal's documentary, is no longer with Reddit. Reddit declined to make anyone available to talk to us, but they said in a statement, quote, Reddit's sitewide policies strictly prohibit posting someone's personal information, including for the purpose of harassment or vigilantism. They also told us that doxing and witch-hunting are against their site-wide policies. But it's an open invitation, Reddit.

Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Dean Russell. It was co-hosted by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and... Amory Severson. Mix and sound designed by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Nora Sacks, Paul Vicus, and Matt Reed. We'll talk to you next week.