“I AM having a wonderful evening,” 21-year-old Brandon Vedas, a computer technician, wrote after logging on to his favourite internet chat site. Less than an hour later, he was dead, killed by a cocktail of prescription drugs, alcohol and marijuana as a dozen internet surfers watched his suicide via a webcam.

A remarkable transcript of Vedas’s chat with his virtual “friends” showed how they egged him on until almost the last minutes of his life. Then they grew alarmed. In the end they panicked, wondering whether they had been accomplices to the world’s first internet suicide.

Vedas’s brother Rich is calling for charges to be laid against those who treated the suicide as a form of online entertainment. “It seems like the group mentality really contributed to it,” he said, adding that the transcript of the event was “disgusting”. The macabre episode began before dawn on January 12 in Phoenix, Arizona. Vedas was in his bedroom, his mother was in the next room doing a crossword puzzle.

Vedas, like most internet chatters, did not use his real name online. Instead, he called himself Ripper. His “friends”, none of whom he had met, also used pseudonyms. That night the virtual chat room, used mainly by drug users who traded tips on how to fake symptoms to get prescriptions for drugs — hosted the likes of Yoda, Smoke2k and Pnutbot.

The conversation started with Ripper inviting his friends to log on to his webcam. When they did, they saw Vedas naked, surrounded by marijuana and prescription drugs. “That’s a lot of Klonopin,” said Grphish. Klonopin, a prescription drug, is used to treat seizures and anxiety. The anonymity of the chat room encouraged the group to treat Ripper like just another expendable video game character. “Take one capsule,” bashed out Grphish, before adding: “Takea thousant!”

Vedas needed no encouragement. Between logging on at 4.02am and 5.04am, when his broadcast ended with the incoherent words “I’m f******”. . . Ripper swallowed suicidal doses of Klonopin, methadone, Restoril and Inderal, along with marijuana and neat rum. All the while, his virtual friends egged him on.

Phalaris could hardly wait to see Ripper “knock his head on the back wall and stay there for the next 14 hours”. Smoke2k demanded: “Eat more. I wanna see if you survive or if you just black out.”

It was not until 1.00pm that Vedas’s mother found her son’s lifeless body, and it was more than a week later that his family switched on his computer and read the 35-page transcript of his fatal drugs binge.

“I told u I was hardcore,” were the last coherent words Vedas managed to type, but the chat does not end there. The transcript records the surfers’ growing panic and they began to wonder if they could be implicated in his death. Pnutbot said: “Shit is going to hit the fan soon”. Another replies “you’re right”.

Police said they would not charge surfers. “It seems he put the drugs in his body of his own volition,” a spokesman said.

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