This seems like the last Seinfeld episode, where they were arrested under a Good Samaritan law for observing a crime but doing nothing to help the victim. If the account in this article is accurate, there were people watching the video feed for "hours" after he took the pills before calling the police. He might be alive if someone called earlier.
A similar thing happened in the Joel on Software Offtopic forum. Idiosyncratic, self described AI researcher Chris McKinstry kept talking about suicide, was mocked, then eventually took some pills and started a thread describing his final time on Earth in periodic posts. No video, and he didn't say where he was, but some people in the thread got close to tracking him down but not in time.
(I used to contribute there, but had stopped before this happened. I found out about it later and dug up the transcript in the archives when I read about it in Wired:
If you call the cops every time someone on the net says they're going to do something harmful to themselves or another, law enforcement would never get anything useful done.
While I can't imagine egging someone on in that case, it's not our collective responsibility to prevent strangers from harming themselves.
A similar thing happened in the Joel on Software Offtopic forum. Idiosyncratic, self described AI researcher Chris McKinstry kept talking about suicide, was mocked, then eventually took some pills and started a thread describing his final time on Earth in periodic posts. No video, and he didn't say where he was, but some people in the thread got close to tracking him down but not in time.
(I used to contribute there, but had stopped before this happened. I found out about it later and dug up the transcript in the archives when I read about it in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimyst...
"He posted the message on his blog and a slightly different version on a forum at Joel on Software, a popular geek hangout.")