he hunt for the last suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings on Friday has revived the search for a missing Brown University student after he the 22-year-old was wrongly fingered as one of the suspects.
Sunil Tripathi's family is outraged and furious over the vile messages they received, although they also help the publicity will help bring in new leads as to his whereabouts.
Tripathi's name spread across Twitter like wildfire for several hours on Friday night after one user claimed he had heard his name used by authorities on a Boston police radio channel.
That rumor later proved to be false.
Within hours, vile messages began cropping up on Sunil's Facebook page and about a dozen news vans camped outside the family's home in Radnor, Pennsylvania.
Tragic: Sunil Tripathi, seen here with his mother and sister, has been missing since last month. He left his cell phone and wallet when he walked out the door
'We find it incredibly unfortunate that media outlets were so quick to jump without checking with authorities, but we hope they use the same energy and intensity they showed in the past 24 hours to really help us find Sunil,' Sangeeta Tripathi, Sunil's sister told Mother Jones.
Users on the social media site Reddit began claiming last night that Tripathi was being sought in the attack that killed three people - and later a MIT campus police officer.
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The claims were fueled by users who said Tripathi looked similar to surveillance images the FBI released of the marathon bombers.
Then, after the suspects engaged in a raging gun battle with police, some Twitter users began to claim that Boston officers began using his name on police scanner traffic. That set off a storm of Twitter speculation.
A review of recordings from police radio traffic, though, shows Sunil was never mentioned by police, according to the Atlantic.
Not the same: Internet commenters claimed that Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student, looked like the image of 'Suspect 2' from the Boston Marathon bombings
Vicious posts began flooding Tripathi's Facebook page.The family was forced to take it off line.
'It seems this is just the ugly underbelly of viral social media,' Sunil's sister Sangeeta Tripathi told NBC News.
'But a lot of stir can be created through just a complete accusatory and unsubstantiated effort.'
Sunil, called 'Sunny' by family and friends, went missing from campus on March 16 after abruptly leaving home and leaving his cell phone and wallet behind.
The speculation led Erik Martin, the general manager of Reddit, to send an email 'to apologize personally and on behalf of all our employees for … some of the people on our site's role in the spreading of this false idea about Sunny.'
No relation: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the real 'Suspect 2,' looks nothing like Sunil - despite online claims
Armed and dangerous: A nationwide manhunt went out for Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev on Friday morning after he evaded capture
By 4am, thousands of tweets made reference to Sunil as a bombing suspect.
One tweet that labeled Suntil as 'suspect one' and named a 'Mike Mulugeta' a suspect two was retweeted 3,000 times.
By daybreak, the suspects had been formally named - brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose family is from the breakaway Russian region of Chechnya.
Sunil has still not be seen since his disappearance. His sister revealed last month that he suffers from depression.