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Annoyed someone called the police when he vanished? What a schmuck...

He deliberately deleted some files from websites he had admin access to. Not exactly the behavior of someone in need of help from the police.

It sure scared a lot of people into thinking that perhaps he was going to commit suicide (or already had), which is something that cops get called about and try to stop.

I'm actually kind of surprised about how many people are not aware of the suicide concern. But then, I worked for a couple of years at a large training site where suicide awareness was a Very Big Deal so perhaps I'm just suffering from transference.

The symptoms displayed by Mark here are very similar to some kind of "classic" pre-suicidal actions (i.e. "putting his affairs in order") so I can definitely see why suicide would be a concern among his friends.

He'd specifically rigged his servers to return 410 Gone, a status code an aside in one of his most famous works equates with the Impermanence of life.

It's not a huge stretch to follow that train of thought to the notion that his actions amounted to a somewhat obscure suicide note. And giving away your stuff/deleting accounts en masse/shutting your life down is a fairly classic behavior among suicidal individuals.

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