Woman kills herself while on Facebook, friends fail to get help
By Emil Protalinski | March 27, 2012, 10:36pm PDT
Summary: A Taiwanese woman committed suicide last week while talking to her friends on Facebook. The friends failed to locate her and did not alert authorities during the 67 minute episode.
31-year-old Claire Lin committed suicide on her birthday, March 18, while on Facebook. Nine of her Facebook friends begged her not to kill herself as she chatted to them live on Facebook, giving them a running commentary of her own suicide. Some of them tried to track her down on their own, but none of them alerted the authorities.
She died of asphyxiation after inhaling poisonous fumes. The whole episode lasted 67 minutes, according to the Facebook logs. It may have been difficult for friends to know where she was given that Facebook can be accessed from almost anywhere nowadays.
Lin was reportedly unhappy because her boyfriend was ignoring her, and had failed to return home to be with her on her birthday. He found her body the following morning and alerted her family, members of which reported the suicide soon after her death but were unaware of the online conversations that accompanied it.