Sunil Tripathi
By A body pulled from waters off a Providence park was that of a 22-year-old Brown University student missing since last month, the Rhode Island medical examiner’s office said Thursday.
Sunil Tripathi was identified through a forensic dental exam, but a cause of death has not been determined, said Dara Chadwick, a spokeswoman for the state health department.
The announcement put an end to the mystery of Tripathi’s disappearance, which became doubly painful for his family when amateur online sleuths wrongly identified him as a possible suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings.
There’s almost certainly no causal connection between the false accusation and his death — it seems enormously unlikely that he was still alive when his reputation was being smeared by inept amateur detectives. But he didn’t deserve to have his reputation posthumously smeared based on pretty much nothing.