[silver5liter]

damn, this is from march

Sunil Tripathi is Not "a Missing Brown Student" So Why the Costly Hunt for Him?


March 28, 2013 09:15 AM EDT
comments: 4
The beguiling 'Find Sunil Tripathi' Facebook campaign that instantly transformed a mundane family melodrama into a major missing-persons saga not only showcases the value of mastering social media, but also the disparity in the way rich and poor are treated by the press and police agencies.
To wit: From the start, 22-year-old Sunny Tripathi, the son of a wealthy software CEO, has been shrewdly marketed by his tech-savvy family as a "missing Brown student" who mysteriously vanished one brisk March morning while strolling his college campus.
In reality, however, this young man isn't missing, per se, and he's not a student at Brown University either.
But those calculated embellishments are far more attention-grabbing than the unadorned truth would be: That Tripathi's scholastic career at the esteemed institute of learning he used to attend was derailed by chronic, untreated depression; and that he left a three word goodbye-cruel-world note just before deliberately dropping off everybody's radar.
Sunil is gone. He's not where he's supposed to be. But going into hiding, planning a highly-publicized suicide, being in the throes of a nervous breakdown—whichever—this is certainly not a missing persons case in the sense that the public has come to understand them: An abduction or a murder.
And, while the Tripathi clan's crisis is undeniably sad, a five-state all out manhunt for an emotionally disturbed, underweight youth who "always wears three winter coats" and has a history of mental illness frankly isn't merited.
That such a mindbogglingly humongous search effort now also includes the supremely pricey services of the taxpayer-funded Federal Bureau of Investigations is also objectionable. Especially considering the unlimited financial assets the Tripathis have at their disposal for conducting this mission on their own, and that those resources should obviously have been spent on getting their troubled son treatment before he pulled a Houdini on them.
"The police and FBI are going above and beyond the call of duty to find Sunil," his mother Judy, a health-care professional, recently told reporters, although nobody answered this reporter's request for clarification as to the reason why.
The feds involvement is additionally offensive since they're all but nonexistent in searches for other young men of much humbler origins who've gone missing unintentionally and, as true victims of foul play, are worthy of the Bureau's assistance.
Such as Colin Gillis, Nick Wilcox, and Charlie Geurts…just to name a few unsolved cases that are being unjustly neglected.