Response to The Story of A Suicide by Ian Parker

"The Story of A Suicide" by Ian Parker is about a college student named Ravi who was thought of as being a main reason for his the suicide of his roommate, Tyler Clementi. Ravi filmed his roommate while he was having sexual intercourse with another man. Ian Parker writes about the two kids and how different they were. He uses information gathered from the internet from other sources that described how Ravi and Clementi were growing up and how it has affected their decisions today- Ravi's decision to film Clementi and Clementi's decision to kill himself. Parker tells us that Clementi was very quiet as a child and often kept to himself, while Ravi was sometimes deemed to do bad things and treat others badly (with a few exceptions). Ravi also thought very highly of himself and drove a very nice car in high school. On the other hand Clementi had no car and his family was not as rich as Ravi's. Ravi performed a lot of "snooping" on the internet on Clementi, this was linked to the allegation of bias intimidation which can put Ravi in jail for 10 years. This allegation assumes that Ravi "intended to harass Clementi because he was gay or that Clementi felt he'd been harassed for being gay," (Parker 37).

While reading this article by Ian Parker, I could not help but feel surprised at the whole incident. What if Ravi did not mean to harass Clementi at all? What if Clementi decided to commit suicide for some reason completely unrelated to Ravi and his film? If that were able to be proven, then I am sure that Ravi would have been forgotten. However, since there is no mention of any other causes, Ravi is to blame and is charged with at least bias intimidation. I think that I would like to also see some research that is unrelated to Ravi. Maybe something else in Clementi's life was the reason he killed himself.