Man's suicide involves drugs — and a webcam

MIAMI — The message OMG popped up next to the live webcam broadcast of Abraham Biggs lying motionless on his bed, followed by LOL and "hahahah."

But Biggs, 19, wasn't joking.

The Broward College student took a lethal mixture of three drugs Wednesday and then blogged about it while a webcam broadcast his actions, including his death, as some computer users egged him on and others tried to talk him out of it.

Some watchers ultimately contacted the Web site to notify police, but by the time officers entered Biggs' home, it was too late. The reality of what happened came to a head for these viewers after police entered the video frame and were seen hovering over his body.

Biggs, who suffered from what his family said was bipolar disorder, or manic depression, lay dead on his bed in his father's Pembroke Pines house Wednesday afternoon, the camera running 12 hours after Biggs announced his intentions online around 3 a.m.

It was unclear how many people watched it unfold.

Biggs was not the first person to commit suicide with a webcam rolling. But the drama and the reaction of those watching were seen as an extreme example of young people's penchant for sharing intimate details about themselves over the Internet.

Biggs' family was infuriated that no one acted sooner to save him, neither the viewers nor the Web site that hosted the live video. The Web site shows a video image, with a space alongside where computer users can instantly post comments.

Only when police arrived did the Web feed stop, "so that's 12 hours of watching," said the victim's sister, Rosalind Bigg, who spells her last name differently. "They got hits, they got viewers, nothing happened for hours."

An autopsy concluded Biggs died from a combination of opiates and benzodiazepine, which his family said was prescribed for his bipolar disorder.

Biggs announced his plans to kill himself over a Web site for bodybuilders, authorities said. But some users told investigators they did not take him seriously because he had threatened suicide on the site before.

Some members of his virtual audience encouraged him to do it, others tried to talk him out of it, and some discussed whether he was taking a dose big enough to kill himself, said Wendy Crane, an investigator with the Broward County Medical Examiner's Office.

A computer user who claimed to have watched said that after swallowing some pills, Biggs went to sleep and appeared to be breathing for a few hours while others cracked jokes.

Someone notified the site's moderator, who traced Biggs' location and called police, Crane said.

Montana Miller, an assistant professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, said Biggs' public suicide was not shocking, given the way teenagers chronicle every facet of their lives on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

"If it's not recorded or documented, then it doesn't even seem worthwhile," she said. Access to a blog and a webcam probably contributed to Biggs's suicide, said Dr. Jon Shaw, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

"There's an exhibitionistic quality to this, a strange dance between the suicide and the audience. He's doing it for the group in a very complicated process we don't really understand. Would he have carried it out without the audience? Probably not."

The webcam might have contributed to the psychological distance that allowed other bloggers to urge, even taunt, the young man to go ahead with the suicide, Shaw said.

"Even a virtual distance can dehumanize the victim," Shaw said.

Worse, the way in which the suicide was done could trigger copycat acts by other young people, said Dr. David Shaffer, director of the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University. Particularly harmful is that Biggs chatted about his intentions almost casually, he said.

He urged people who encounter someone on a blog who is threatening suicide not to simply urge them to desist, but rather to try to engage them in conversation.

"They should say, 'Hey, can we talk?' Get him to tell what's going on. If he can tell his story, his urge to suicide might be diminished."

Information from The Miami Herald is included in this report.