Reddit users could be held accountable for suicide... say what?

"Our family has decided to take legal action not only against his ex-wife, but those who urged him on to take his own life. Next week, our lawyer will be filing a wrongful death suit in Washington State against nine individuals. Our lawyer hired a private investigator and three of the individuals have been identified from those who urged Jerry to kill himself. Subpoenas will be issued to find the identity of the other three, though it is possible that they were the same people. We don’t know yet. We were told by our lawyer not to give any other information out such as our full names or the people to be named in the lawsuit"

I am bad at math , but.........?

This is what happens when blogs and tech "news" sites report on stuff without doing any fact checking at all. Plenty of redditors did a bit more digging around and it seems to be a hoax since there is no link between the guy who committed suicide and the posting. There is no subnoea served and the police report doesn't have any links between them. It's one group of redditors who dislike another group and seem to be trolling.

Anyway, I don't think these stories belong on hn, so flagged.

I've no idea of the legality involved, but from a moral and ethical perspective, egging on a depressed, suicidal person is immoral and ethical with a possible few exceptions (e.g. terminally ill person wishing to cut short a remaining painful period). Ironic, perhaps, that these Reddit users probably got karma on the site at the same time they in fact earned negative karma under whatever value system you prefer.