At any rate, happy exclusive Debian user here for the past 15 years. Thank you, Ian, gone too soon. Your name lives on in half the name of my most belovèd OS.
I mean I guess you might wonder what exactly was running through his mind at the moment, but that seems a little morbid and super personal to me. It's enough to me at a high level that he had personal mental health issues he was dealing with, never got the right help, and ultimately succumbed to his demons. Is that an Elvis/Tupac kind of mystery?
Crystals are like that too: along one axis you can up the pressure to incredible values and nothing will even show to indicate something is up, then you tap them lightly along another axis and boom, nothing but dust left.
Things that can trigger this kind of episode besides the obvious medical causes are simultaneous crisis in relationships, financial situation (probably not here) and professional life. Other ways in which it can happen are bad drug trips and many other ways besides.
Yet another option is that there is real substance to Ians claims about police brutality but he could have done a lot better if he wanted to make that claim and make it stick. All in all an extremely sad affair where I'm fairly sure we'll never know the real root cause, all we can do is keep our eyes open for repeats of such patterns in the people near to us and to hopefully react in time when we see them.
In Ian's case, some combination of alcohol, depression, and police violence (seriously, go read the coroner's report) seems to be the cause.
What's entirely absurd is the number of people here who, hat in hand, are all too happy to say "well golly gee another terrible victim of mental health problems" and ignore the likely sexual abuse ("cavity search" in polite terms) that Ian suffered at the hands of the police.
If the same story happened here with !police, you can bet your ass that people here would be incensed and crying about how something must be done, but yet given what happened here everybody seems oddly okay with blaming the victim and spreading the vague explanation of mental health.
That's not right, that's not justice, and that's not what we should be doing.
Then again, it's a lot easier than realizing how fucked the system has become while we've been screwing around in startupcanistan.
My recollection of events were essentially Ian gets drunk, knocks on neighbors door and makes noise. Police come to "Deal with him"
If his twitter rant was honest then the police beat him possibly causing a concussion.
Whether you want to say that's his fault for being belligerent is up to your personal principles.
He gets concussion and starts strange rant. AFAIK Ian never had a history of this kind of behavior. Maybe his family stated differently. Maybe if they stated he had a history it was of alcohol abuse and not the kind of schizophrenic behavior he was portraying on Twitter.
I take it everyone didn't really look into it much further because lack of options. "Police report says they had a drunk belligerent man come in and then they released him."
Personally, given modern videos of police behavior I believe it is possible he was "acting foolish maybe even violent" at the station due to intoxication and one or more cops decided to shut him up.
Then it kind of ends up being like an Aaron Swartz situation. They weren't murdered but I think they were both victims of improper justice.
Maybe I get down-voted for being a bit brash here or ignorant of more facts with the story but I think people kind of takes on this attitude of "Well, I'm alive... moving on".
His tweet about spending the rest of his life fighting injustice is the kind of chilling reality of this mentality.
No-one really cares until they or their family have suffered injustice, prejudice, or unfair bias.
Or maybe he really was an Ahole (behind closed doors) if his tweets were an honest realization of his inner self and that's why no-one cares to defend a racist.
So, I think you're right. I think we will never know and I think maybe people don't talk about it because there's a certain kind of professionalism expected of people.
As John Stewart said, you can have great respect for police and simultaneously hold them to a higher standard.
Or maybe we should be talking about alcoholism. I don't know but like you I also feel uncomfortable with people saying "Dedicated to this guy" because it feels phony on some level.
If he had a history of mental illness; as much as I wish his family peace I think society is better if we know the full story.
Recently read the Wiki page on Jim Carey giving his ex-girlfriend (who comitted suicide after he broke up with her) S.T.D. allegedly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Carrey#Relationships
As much as I want to ignore reality like everyone else, I think we have a huge problem with phoniness that just makes things harder to cope with.