Reddit Co-Founder Found Dead In Seventh-Floor Apartment
Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz was found in his seventh-floor Brooklyn apartment in an apparent suicide Friday morning. According to police sources, he was found hanging by a belt and there has been no note recovered.
Swartz, 26, was to face trial next month for his role in a controversial computer-hacking case. An autopsy will be performed by the city’s medical examiner.
Swartz’s death comes two years after he was arrested for breaching a computer network of Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the intent to gain access to and download numerous documents and pages. The federal charges – computer fraud and wire fraud – carried with them a potential 35-year prison sentence and a $1 million fine. The trial was set to start in February.
In 2011, he was indicted for stealing nearly five million scholarly papers from non-profit archive JSTOR. He plead not guilty to all the charges.
Swartz was considered a computer prodigy, helping to develop RSS when he was 14 and would later co-found Reddit, a social news website. He also led Demand Progress, which is an Internet group that crusades against web censorship.
Along with the financial troubles he was facing, Swartz wrote about his problem with depression.
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