Deadly Chatter
By Susan Horsburgh and Johnny Dodd
Brandon Vedas OD'd on Drugs While Internet Pals Watched—and Egged Him on
Brandon Vedas was sitting by himself at his bedroom computer in the early hours of Jan. 12, but
he was hardly alone.
"Take one capsule."
"Take a thousand!"
"Lwanna see if you survive or if you just black out."
As other members of a chat room devoted to drug users cheered him ony Vedas, 21; downed one
prescription pill after another while smoking pot.
"Do it," wrote one of his pals:
"Cram it."
But as dawn approached—and with a half dozen other chatters watching via a "Webcam—the
dangerous game was taking its toll on Vedas. "I told you I was hardcore," he boasted to his
buddies in a final burst of coherence, =
“Minutes later he lost consciousness for good.
‘Vedas's lethal overdose might have been remembered like any other case of young man gone
before his time. As it happens, however, it was something of a first: a deadly round of truth or
dare viewed live over the Internet. According to a transcript of the chat room found on the Web
by Vedas's brother a week later, several of his online pals did send warnings during the two-hour
binge—"man don't die," "who's calling the cops when he passes out?"—but none actually called
police or alerted Vedas's mother, who, for part of the time at least, was.asleep in the next room,
"What has the world come to when people are watching someone die on a Webcam?" asks
Vedas's mother, Nancy Russell, 52, who discovered Brandon's body when she tried to rouse him
to work at the University of Phoenix computer technology department. Emergency workers
found bottles of Klonopin, methadone, Restoril and Inderal stashed around his room. "If only
someone had encouraged him to get help, then maybe he would have just overdosed. Brandon.
would be in counseling now, instead of dead.”en
Brandon's brother Rich, 28, 2 Huntington Beach, Calif, sales rep, says he has spoken with three
of the people who were in the chat room. One, according to Rich, claimed that he dialed 911, but '
the dispatcher said he couldn't help. Meanwhile police have rejected Russell's request to file
charges against the people who encouraged her son to take drugs that morning, "There was no
coercion or duress. He could have stopped taking pills anytime he wanted to," says Phoenix
Police Dept. Sgt. Randy Fotce. "This is a guy who had a history of drugs, and it caught up with
him." (Tests to determine Vedas's exact cause of death are still pending.) As for the reaction of
those who witnessed the death online, says Internet scholar John Perry Barlow, "young people by
nature like to play around with the edge of death. What makes this different is that the edge was
blunted by being virtual. It must have been like a video game."
Still, for Brandon's family, the feeling remains that his friends abandoned him when he needed
them most. "We're in complete shock," says Rich, the second of Russell's five children with
computer technician Richard Vedas, whom she divorced in the lite '80s, The youngest of the
kids, Brandon was a high-tech whiz, who dropped out of high school at 16 but eamed a G.E.D.
and managed to land impressive jobs writing software and building networks. "He was a cla
computer dork in a lot of ways,"’says Rich.
But Brandon could also be immature, his brothers say. About 3% years ago, when his mother
remarried, he moved out of the family home and discovered Phoenix's rave scene. According to
his brother Brett, 23, a Phoenix bartender, Brandon began using a wide range of drugs, including —
Ecstasy, LSD and speed. Then, just as abruptly as he had stumbled, Vedas seemed to pick
himself back up. "One day he just realized, 'This is probably going to kill me,'" says Brett.
About a year ago Brandon began seeking help from a doctor, who prescribed medicine for
depression. He also movetsback in with his mother. "He assuted.me he was turning his life
around," says Russell, who adds that Brandon had just landed his job and started dating a new
girl. "He seemed so positive," she says.
Russell is adamant that her son would never have intentionally killed himself. But after his final
Internet session, she says, the family did discover Brandon was well-known in chat rooms for
drug devotees, where he went by the name Ripper and had been using the drugs prescribed by his
doctor to get high. "I was so oblivious to what he was doing," says Russell, "We're hoping his
death will make people more aware of what's going on around them.”