Sunil Tripathi

Sunil Tripathi (August 14, 1990 – March or April 2013) was an American student who went missing on March 16, 2013. His disappearance received widespread media attention after he was wrongfully accused on social media as a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. Tripathi had actually been missing for a month prior to the April 15, 2013, bombings. His body was found on April 23, after the actual bombing suspects had been officially identified and apprehended.

Disappearance

Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University undergraduate student, had gone missing on March 16, 2013, having suspended his studies due to bouts of depression. He had left his phone and wallet behind in his student accommodation. Known by his family as "Sunny", he was 22 years old at the time of his disappearance. The family turned to social media to assist in their search for their son, uploading a video to YouTube and setting up a Facebook page. His parents were migrants from India.

Misidentification

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 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 3000 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 redditor 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. According to the BBC
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