In the aftermath of the
Boston Marathon bombing, Tripathi was one of several people misidentified as a suspect by users on social media. On April 16, 2013, one day after the bombings,
Reddit users created a subreddit named
r/findbostonbombers with the intention of consolidating the information surrounding the events of the bombings in an attempt to identify the culprits of the attack. By Wednesday, April 17, over 3,000 people had joined the subreddit in order to
crowdsource the investigation of the evidence. At 5:00 p.m. on April 18, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation published photos of the suspects believed to be involved in the bombings. Soon after, another Redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Although this behavior violated the subreddit's rule that prohibited naming suspects without evidence, the
moderators did not delete the post. To further the speculation behind Tripathi, a woman claiming to be his classmate tweeted that she too thought Tripathi resembled a suspect in the FBI's photographs. Soon after the release of the photos, people began trying to contact the Tripathi family, through phone calls on
ABC News, as well as angry messages on Tripathi's Facebook page, dedicated to finding Sunil. At 11p.m. on the same day, the real bombing suspects (
Dzhokhar and
Tamerlan Tsarnaev) shot and killed a police officer of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Department. The following day at 2:45a.m., a Reddit user reposted a tweet by
Twitter user "Greg Hughes": "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi." This caught the mainstream media's attention after
BuzzFeed reporter
Andrew Kaczynski shared a tweet that named Sunil as the primary suspect from his personal Twitter account. Sunil was found dead on April 23. Mulugeta was an unrelated person whose last name was spelled out in the
Boston Police scanner that night, and whose first name was never confirmed to be "Mike." Tripathi's name was never mentioned in the scanner.
Reaction The misidentification of Tripathi led to questions in the media about whether the so-called "crowd-sourced investigations" should be prevented in the future, citing the harm caused to people such as the relatives of Tripathi, as well as other wrongly-identified suspects who then feared for their safety. Some argued that they are unstoppable because of the nature of the
Internet, with the only hope being that awareness of the possible effects of errors such as this would lead to future caution. Posting on Facebook, Tripathi's family described the tremendous amount of attention the misidentification had caused as painful, but they sought to use the negative publicity of the case to assist in their search by raising awareness. == Discovery of death ==