Rutgers Student Apparently Sought Help Before Committing Suicide

Tyler Clementi appears to have posted about his roommate's alleged spying online – and consulted his residence assistant

On Sept. 21, the day before he committed suicide, Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi was apparently angry that his roommate, Dharun Ravi, had allegedly recorded him kissing another man in his dorm room – and broadcast the encounter online.

Postings on the Web site Justusboys.com’s message board, which appear to have been written by Clementi under the alias “cit2mo,” document his feelings and actions in the hours leading up to his Sept. 22 suicide.

“I’m kinda pissed at him,” Clementi apparently wrote about his roommate on Sept. 21. “It would be nice to get him into trouble … I feel like the only thing the school might do is find me another roommate … and I’d probably just end up with somebody worse than him.”

“I mean aside from being an a–––e from time to time, he’s a pretty decent roommate.”

While many questions remain, Clementi’s apparent online postings, which seem to follow a realistic timeline of events, reveal a young man who was struggling with what actions to take next.

In a Sept. 21 post, Clementi, 18, expressed his anger, writing on the message board, “the fact that the people he was with saw my making out with a guy as the scandal, whereas I mean come on…he was SPYING ON ME…do they see something wrong with this?”

But later that evening, he wrote, “Revenge never ends well for me. As much as I would love to pour pink paint all over his stuff that would just let him win.”

Final Hours

On Sept. 22, Clementi logged back on to the site at 4:38 a.m. with an update.

“So I wanted to have the guy over again. I texted roomie around 7 asking for the room later tonite and he said it was fine,” he wrote. “When I got back to the room, I instantly noticed he had turned the webcam toward my bed and he had posted online again saying…’Anyone want a free show just video chat with me tonight.’ ”

Then, Clementi apparently decided to get help.

“I ran to the nearest R.A. and set this thing in motion,” he wrote. “We’ll see what happens.”

In a post two hours later, he wrote that his residence assistant took his concerns seriously. “He asked me to email him a written paragraph about exactly what happened,” Clementi wrote. “I emailed it to him and to two people above him.”

Later that night, though, Clementi drove onto the George Washington Bridge, parked his car and posted his final message on Facebook: “Jumping off the gw bridge. Sorry.”

He then walked a mile onto the span and jumped to his death at approximately 8:50 p.m.

Clementi’s body was found in the Hudson River and identified on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the two Rutgers freshman, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, have each been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy for “using the camera to view and transmit a live image.”