Indian American Sunil Tripathi was not a Boston Marathon bombing suspect
In the days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013, social media users wrongly identified missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi as one of the attackers. He was never a suspect.
Tripathi, a 22-year-old from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, had been missing since March 16, and his family had been searching for him with help from the FBI and Brown students. After the FBI released surveillance photos of two unidentified suspects on April 17, users on Reddit and Twitter began circulating Tripathi's name and photo as a possible match, and the false identification spread widely before any official identification was made.
On April 18, the FBI formally identified the suspects as brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Reddit's moderators later issued a public apology for the role the site's users played in spreading the misidentification.
Tripathi's family, who had been pleading for help finding their son, instead faced harassment and false accusations during an already painful time. His body was found in waters off India Point Park in Providence on April 23 and identified through dental records on April 25.
The episode became one of the most widely cited examples of how crowdsourced speculation can go badly wrong during a breaking-news event.
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