User:Andy/Ripper

This article was originally written in March 2003.

RIP Brandon Vedas?
Apparently a 21 year old guy from Phoenix by the name of Brandon Vedas, in mid-January overdosed on IRC voluntarily whilst being egged on by his IRC friends. I copied [[Media:Vedas.txt|a log]] from one of the sites about this guy, because these sites seem to keep being taken down. Sorry for the crappy formatting, blame it entirely on the site it came from.

Coverage of this incident in the news seems to be incredibly thin on the ground. All we could find was a mention in the NY Daily News [since removed]. Compare this with Sk0t, who got news coverage within 1 day of him frying his dumb ass. Why did it take two weeks for a single solitary report to appear in a newspaper, a not well known newspaper, which only repeats info from the other pages?

Did this really happen or was it a hoax? I remain unconvinced. Please help me find out the truth!

More Brandon Vedas links (which may or may not survive the test of time):


 * Brandon Vedas at Wikipedia
 * An obituary
 * Tardshrine

Update - 07/02/2003
It's looking a lot more like this truly happened. The long gap between death and news coverage seems to be explained by the claim that it was more than a week after his death before anyone turned his computer on and read the logs.

At least I am not the only cynic on the internet. Out of the 7 IRC people who took any interest, 6 thought this was a hoax up until this day.