Wednesday, March 3, 2010

A German Internet Provider blamed in suicide

The German Internet provider Deutsche Telekom is blamed for the suicide of the 18 year old boy Thorsten S. Thorsten was diagnosed with depression when his mom left him. He has been in mental hospital for couple of months and after an improvement in his condition he was released, as he wanted to continue with his education. Later he started to experience the symptoms again. He started to cut himself with a raiser, couldn't go out of the house...He decided to put an end to his life and wrote in the Deutsche Telekom forum that he has taken over 100 pills of Diazepam, Palladon, Paroxetin and Doxepin. It was a deadly cocktail. He kept writing in the forum for couple of hours explaining why he is doing this.
In the morning Nadine Friedrichs, the administrator of the forum, spotted the posting and immediately called the authorities. The administrator gave the police the on-line address of the sender of the message. With that information, the Internet service provider (in this case Deutsche Telekom) could track down Thorsten's physical address. An emergency doctor could have been dispatched to Thorsten within 20 minutes. Unfortunately Deustche Telekom did not want to give out the address of the 18 year old boy at first hand. Then the police had to contact higher authorities so that they could make the internet provider to give out the address. At the end the police managed to get the address from a different internet provider but it was already too late. When the police and the fire department personnel got into the room of the boy he was already dead. This is not the first time Deutsche Telekom refuses to give out important information about their customers in situations like this.
This article can be found at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,681349,00.html

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