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Debian Founder's 2015 Death Ruled A Suicide (theregister.co.uk)
gosand writes: According to a story on The Register, the death of Ian Murdock in late 2015 has been ruled a suicide. This news brings some closure to the sad ending of his life. An interesting note from the article that I never knew before: "he was the Ian in Debian; his girlfriend at the time, Debra Lynn, was the Deb." Debian has truly been a cornerstone in the Linux world, and the founder will be missed. The medical report was obtained on Wednesday by CNN journalists.
I think there was probably more to it than that:
- His girlfriend recently broke up with him, which was after already having been divorced.
- He was within days of being evicted for routine noise and other disturbances.
- He was a very habitual drinker and often had side effects from alcohol withdrawal, had Asperger's, and known psychological problems for the past 20 years.
- The neighbor said he apologized to them about the noise and other disturbances he has made in the past at about 3:30PM the night he committed suicide. The neighbor commented that they though this was really odd.
This has all been corroborated by other witnesses and medical professionals.
It seems as though he was already in a really bad position and probably decided to commit suicide earlier in the day. When somebody is in such a state, it's happened many times that they try to make somebody else feel at fault, or otherwise try to push blame on somebody else, which could be a motivation for police involvement (and subsequent blame.) I've witnessed this before myself.
I'm of half of a mind to think that the police themselves had little to do with it, other than perhaps they were routinely called to his residence (probably for good reason, based on the neighbor's statements) which made him have a grudge against the police.
I don't know him so this is mainly speculation, but when it comes to suicide you often never know why somebody actually wanted to kill themselves. Even when they leave some kind of note, there's often a misdirection of blame (which I guess his twitter feed was his suicide note. Notice the repeated use of the N word, among other things.)
Wow, someone's invented the self-rating comment!