Hacker News Reader

> Family of missing Brown university student Sunil Tripathi has taken down the Facebook page dedicated to him.

This has to really suck for them. I can't imagine what they must be going through right now...

Edit: Just 10 days ago his family and friends made this video: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Missing-Brown-Stud...

To go from that to discovering he's one of the marathon bombers...

Edit 2: Looks like he isn't a suspect after all (someone said his name on the police scanner and it spread through the net like wildfire): https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/325176638537076736

This is really heartbreaking. By all accounts, that guy had exceptional friends and family who really cared for him. By the looks of it he is/was intelligent, from a reasonably affluent background, well educated, surrounded by incredibly nice and loving people. 99.99% of us would have good reason to be jealous of this background, I certainly am. One can only speculate what insanity drove him to do this.

Update: it looks like that was utterly false information, originally spewed into the ether by Punditpress. I'm really glad it didn't turn out to be this guy. I hope they do find him or he decides to go home again.

This whole thread puts HN to shame. It is a shame on all of us. Horrific. Just horrific. Shame on the people who threw some innocent Brown (yes, the school, not the skin color) kid under the bus, or MIT or whatever other school. The kid is missing and his family gets death threats for something he didn't do. They even had to take down their searching for him page. Shame on all of us for participating in this.

It pains me to admit this, but your self-righteous indignation is justified. Like I said, I just hope something positive comes out of this and the increased awareness leads to him being found, or better: him deciding it's time to go home to such an amazing group of people who clearly love him very much.

Speak for yourself.

I flagged the entire thread immediately. I suggest you do the same in the future. This does not belong on HN.

> To go from that to discovering he's one of the marathon bombers...

Wait, is that confirmed?

I read this:

http://globalgrind.com/news/411-sunil-tripathi-missing-brown...

which seemed legit, until I read the source:

http://www.punditpress.com/2013/04/sunil-tripathi-informatio...

which seems really sketchy. I've seen it a bunch of places, making it seem like it was confirmed but people are now refuting it:

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/325176638537076736

I hope for his family's sake it's not him.

Edit: And it seems confirmed that it isn't: http://hosted2.ap.org/CAANR/e109e277e48c4e219e07a1d4710177b3...

They're saying it was two Russians now on WCVB. Not sure how credible that is yet. On the other hand, the mere existence of that information on Punditpress is a good reason to doubt its accuracy.

Update: It's semi-official now (on WCVB): the two men were apparently from Chechnya.

Can this please be taken down?

AP just confirmed the name of the second suspect and it's not one of those above.

You're smearing innocents.

Adding this here since this is the top comment:

Suspects are Chechnyan brothers: 19 and 20.

1. Tamerlan Tsarnaev [dead]

2. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev [still at large]

Dzhokhar is trapped somewhere in a 20 block radius in the town of Watertown, that is being searched by the police.

[1]: Live Google News Updates: https://goo.gl/f5HTZ

[2]: https://aljazeera.com/watch_now

I certainly do hope someone is going to take this down. I did downvote it when the post was first made, but it seems like people have gone crazy over there in the States, what with the public naming and blaming of "suspects".

WCVB is reporting that [NAME 1] has died from his wounds [1]. [NAME 2] is still at large — the police are setting up a perimeter and the search will become much easier in several hours when the sun rises.

[1] http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/metro/Boston-Marathon-suspect...

EDIT: As I follow the news, it becomes clearer that a large majority of the information is coming from the police scanner. It is interesting to see the way old and new technologies are mixing in the coverage. The reddit thread is essentially a scraper of the scanner; it is very useful to have access to the transcription of important audio because you can take breaks without worrying about missing something.

EDIT 2: Because the names haven't been confirmed yet (Pete Williams says that Tripathi is not suspect #2), and have been removed from the original article, I thought I would change my post accordingly. The names were picked up from the BPD scanner.

[NAME 1: Mike Mulugeta]

[NAME 2: Sunil Tripathi]

The article does not use either of those names.

Those names were redacted. I can also attest that the same names were mentioned as the lead suspects.

I am still listening to the police feed as I type.

Mentioned by whom, where?

It was from here: http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/6254/web

From which police officer? I do not know. Probably command central.

NBC/MSNBC now reporting that Sunil is NOT the suspect at large.

"Speculation that one of bombing suspects is a missing student is not correct, sources tell @PeteWilliamsNBC"

via https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/325178091947323392

"White hat guy" vs "Sunil Tripathi"

http://i.imgur.com/3Bh7rkc.gif

They look like different people to me.

They look pretty similar to me.

I feel this is horrible way of morphing the two pics, the lips are totally different in proportions, that is the hardest thing to morph. Any wrong assumptions can get someone killed, please refrain. Calm down people.

Oh, I don't know who either of the two is, I was just remarking that they look similar. Can someone clarify?

At that resolution level, the second image should look similar.

Heck video games depended on people filling in the blanks when using low rez sprites to convey information, and it still works swimmingly.

People will see everything from Marlin Brando to the Mona Lisa in low resolution images, while their brain will happily fill in the blanks.

Sure, but I mean to ask "who's white hat guy" and "what does Sunil have to do with either of the two attacks"? I saw the name thrown about here but nobody really clarified.

Ah, Redditors were in a large thread looking at the marathon bomb blast pictures, to identify suspects. Someone on reddit linked pictures of one suspect to the missing student, Sunil.

Really? What kind of hacker are you if you don't think about basic statistics and false positives? Jeez... The readership here has dropped to the level of slime mold. I guess I'm starting to fall into this category myself.

It's a basic statement of fact. They look similar to me. I don't know where statistics come into that in your mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

I have yet to see an actual news outlet use either of these two names. There have been plenty of tweets referring to a police scanner without anyone actually confirming that the names were used.

I would not trust tweets regarding the names going out over the radio.

I was a mile away from the bombings and I'm a Brown graduate. It's seriously freaking me out.

UPDATE 6:

  08.49: The names Sunil or Sunny have been heard on the
  Boston police scanner tonight referring to Suspect No 2,
  the man who is still on the run. Sunil Tripathi, a
  philosophy major at Brown University has been missing for
  a month. Local press reports say that Boston police have
  identified him as a suspect.

  Mr Tripathi is described as a left-wing Marxist of 
  Indian Brahmin descent, whose father is a successful
  software developer. His family set up a Twitter account
  and a Facebook page last month to help the search for 
  him. Mr Tripathi was first identified as a suspect in a
  crowdsleuthing exercise on the Reddit website.

  The other suspect, who was wearing the black hat, has 
  been named as Mike Mulugeta. He is thought to have died 
  in hospital after a shoot-out with police.

  Their identities have not been officially confirmed.

Source:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/americas/article374...

"Brahmin"!? His caste is relevant, how, exactly? Only a British (or worse, Indian) newspaper would find the necessity to point out the caste of some person being tried by a public mob based on things heard on a police scanner.

I have never read an Indian newspaper making reference to someone's caste unless it was somewhat related to the story.

You are right - Indian newspapers usually refer to it only when it is at least tangentially relevant - eg. usually they'll refer to some politician's caste. I consider this to be just as bad because it continues to put caste front and center as a factor to be considered when evaluating a political.

The AP just reported that they are from Russia. https://twitter.com/AP/status/325196873486962688

Update: AP now reports the suspect is Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev https://twitter.com/AP/status/325198361428893698

The update you quoted above has conveniently been deleted from the source now that the AP has done some real reporting and identified the Russian suspects.

UPDATE 5: Massachusetts Bay Transpiration Authority is currently suspending all service at request of Boston police.

Source(s):

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/325183434597228546

https://twitter.com/masslivenews/status/325184070508224513

Commuter rail far from the city is closed as well, full system shutdown.