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Sunil Tripathi, 22, was arguably one the final casualties of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
The then-Brown University student had been missing for a month when the Boston Police Department released blurry photos of the two suspects in the attack. Suspect #2 wore a white baseball cap over black hair as Tripathi sometimes liked to; both Tripathi and the suspect had distinctive facial features.
On Twitter, a woman suggested that Tripathi looked like Suspect #2. And within hours of that tweet, which was posted two years ago this weekend, millions concluded he was indeed a suspect. Scores of journalists called the family seeking comment, the online community vilified Tripathi, and his identity was lost to an online community's yearning to become quasi investigators, journalists and crime solvers, a consequence of uncensored, free-flowing information.
Tripathi now carries an epitaph for a crime he did not commit, the falsely accused Boston Marathon bomber. A documentary called "Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi" captures the search for him, both while he was missing and in the aftermath of a false accusation. Premiering last fall at a film festival in Atlanta where it won the audience award for feature film, the documentary dissects how everyone's ability to captivate a world audience is leading to greater misinformation, in this case through a series of tweets and Reddit messages validated by media outlets.
The search may have been for Tripathi, the movie suggests, but it may be we who are lost.
Indeed, the public's understanding of news events is increasingly punctuated with misinformation--the protest that never happened in Benghazi; the mother who did not teach at Sandy Hook when her son shot 26 people; the Secret Service agents who may or may not have been drunk when they did not run over a suspicious package.
The documentary, produced and directed by three former CNN producers, explains "probably just the beginning of modern digital witchhunting [sic]," as one person presciently tweeted in the immediate aftermath of the bombings.
Director Neal Broffman and executive producer Elisa Gambino, who are also husband and wife, had met Tripathi's sister on an assignment in east Africa before her brother's disappearance. They helped during the search, and the movie became their first feature length documentary, which took about...