As with any thread, posted advice should be viewed with prudence, especially in matters which have legal implications. Questioning another poster’s credentials would best take place in a pit thread, where off-topic ire with other posters is generally welcomed. Here, let’s stay on the topic of this thread, which is OP’s grappling with issues surrounding his friend’s suicide.
Please stay as far from this coming mess as possible - if the police get looking for a harmed child, they will not give a rat’s ass who they destroy in the process.
LAWYER UP!!!
Don’t even come back to these boards.
And isn’t it time to clean up your cookies? Those pesky ads are getting really annoying, aren’t they
LAWYER
I asked the mods to delete this thread before you had a chance to say something very unfortunate. Their legal types probably told them not to get involved.
LAWYER
Got news for ya, kid, you aren’t ever going to get this resolved. He **did **kill himself for nothing. That’s part of the wonder of suicide. Somebody is dead, and the survivors don’t know shit, and they are in pain. End of story. You are feeling sorry for yourself as well as for Dave. Knock it off. There ain’t no happy ending to this story. Carry on with your life.
Now, forget Dave’s sister going to see a lawyer. He/She won’t be representing you.
Just think about how it would be to wonder if Dave’s suicide had meaning while you are wearing an orange jumpsuit. Walk away from everything. Leave his computer alone. Do not go to the cops. If there is any liability, let the police find it. From now on, keep your trap shut about Dave, esp.to the police. If police ask you any questions, say that you need to speak to an attorney and can’t afford one. Dave ain’t coming back, so you can’t help him by spilling your guts.
Unless Dave left a message with the cops detailing who his victim was - if there even was a victim, which I hasten to point out none of us know yet - so that kid could be helped I not sure there’s a happy, or even mediocre, end to this.
Kinda seems a bit like a cute rich quad girl in here if you know what I mean . . .
While I commend you for sticking by your friend, please do not entertain the notion that looking at child porn is a “victimless” crime. These are actual kids, being harmed and exploited to create this stuff. It’s still abuse.
I hope everything goes all right for you in the end – until then, stay away from the computer, Dave’s place, and consult an attourney. If you want contact with your kids, you need to decide what’s really important.
Where was this notion expressed? 
I’m guessing from this comment:
I kinda got the same impression as Guinastasia when I read it.
Underline mine: no, it’s not. Like hell is it the end when it stops happening. It’s a monkey that never stops riding your back, that one.
Seems like a stretch to me to suggest he was implying child porn was a victimless crime from that post but I guess one could read it that way.
Well more so that he was implying, that since it was ‘just’ pictures, his friend wasn’t harming anyone and thus was no immediate reason to turn him in. Again, that’s just how I read it.
Yep, exactly. Child porn is never “just pictures”. Not saying you should have abandoned your friend, but make no mistake – that’s still harming a child.
IF I’m wrong, I appologize.
There are forms of child porn that involve drawings, or text, that arguably does not harm children. That doesn’t automatically make that OK, either, but not all porn involves photographs or human models.
Yes, I do know what you mean and being cutesy doesn’t obscure it. Don’t make trolling accusations in this forum.
For the record on who is probably the authentic lawyer in Procrustus vs. Pchaos
[QUOTE=Emily’s Lawer]
Don’t say or post anything relating to this, even on a so-called anonymous message board. The opinions of a bunch of strangers on the internet doesn’t mean anything compared to what is at stake here.
[/QUOTE]
However, I didn’t pay for that advice, and I’m only mostly going to follow it.
As I said before, there was a letter. More than one, actually. Now, I can’t disclose any of the contents of the letters. I’m sorry. However, I can ask you all to re-read post #64 in the thread by Broomstick, and keep that in mind while I tell you about a dream I had last night. In that dream, bad people were convicted in a court of law for doing bad things. And after that happened, I came back to this very thread, years later, bumped it, and was free to tell the whole story of how my friends suicide fit into that.
Now, that’s just a dream. A dream made unlikely by my friends refusal to face the shit he was in, and to run away from that shit into death. I even have to admit that it could be a dream that only existed in my friends head. He did kill himself, I have to face the possibility that those letters were all bullshit, either delusions or conscious lies to try to spare me and Emily pain. Emily and I decided to believe, at least until we have evidence pointing the other way. I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t, especially with the little I’ve posted.
The cold truth is that it doesn’t matter any more. The computer, letter, and files that Dave indicated are in the hands of the lawyer. Emily and I will be there to clean the place out before the end of the month, and if we find anything, it will be sent straight to the lawyer. I’m officially uninvolved. I’m making no statements to the police or anyone else, this is all Emily’s headache now. I’ll find out in time whether there was any truth to those letters, and right now I’m ready to be done with this whole thing.
But if I’m done with this whole thing, why am I back here posting about it again, even against legal advice? I’ve thought about that a bit, and I guess the answer is that it wasn’t just Dave’s death that was a tragedy. It was his entire life. His funeral is tomorrow. I’m just going to quote part of the speech I going to be giving.
[QUOTE=My speech]
Dave was a man who had a disease. This disease took something that’s normally a source of joy and turned it into something that only could cause pain. This disease took something that brings people together, and it removed him from everyone around him. This disease took away any chance of him experiencing romantic love. This disease took away his hopes of having a family. This disease put him on the road that led him to prison.
The most amazing thing about Dave was how he handled it. It was like having faced his potential and despite for doing evil, he was determined to turn himself into the best person he could. I remember hearing how at the age of fifteen, Dave found a stack of fifties still wrapped with those bank paper labels lying in front of the the door to the bank. He picked it up and returned it without even thinking about keeping it for himself. He was even surprised when they offered him a reward.
And after the news came out, and he was released from prison, I saw people spit on him, and while he looked hurt, he never got mad at them. I remember him saying, “Even though I’ve done what I can to make things right, it doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t matter what they think. I can look at my own face every morning without shame, and I’ll wager many of those who look down on me can’t do that.”
He bore his disease with more grace and dignity than I could have ever managed. Despite everyone around him labelling him a monster, he never accepted that label for himself. He saw himself as just a person with a disease requiring special treatment, and he faced those problems head on with courage. That disease was dark, and to face it, Dave carried a light as bright as the sun in his heart, to fight that darkness.
We will probably never know what happened in the last weeks of Dave’s life that made him take his own life. But in my heart, I believe that Dave died because of fighting that darkness, refusing to let it win. I hope that he finds peace now, and release from that burden that he carried so long.
[/QUOTE]
That’s why I’m back here. I can’t make a monument or anything in real life to the tragedy that was Dave’s life. I’m hoping that this thread can stand as an example that not all pedophiles are monsters, or even subhuman. Despite all his flaws, Dave was one of the upstanding people I’ve ever met, and barely anyone ever saw it.
And I am going to ask the mods publicly to NOT delete this thread. I’m a grown man, and being Dave’s friend, I have certainly seen the collateral damage that could result from talking about this stuff. If they have to lock it, I’m OK with that, but please don’t delete it. I cry every time I tell that story of Dave rescuing me, and typing it out for all of you here was no exception. Don’t make those tears meaningless.
I don’t. Trust me when I say that I know more about child porn than I ever wanted to, and while I may have tolerated him using it, I discouraged it strongly. If you want to talk more about this, feel free to start another thread, and I would be able to go into stomach retching detail. But not here in this thread please.
You know, I actually wish that I was just making this shit up for sympathy and to get called a liar on the internet. It would be a lot easier. I’m sure I’d be sleeping better since I wouldn’t be having nightmares about finding that fucking body. I’m sure I’d be crying a lot less, and I’d really be glad to not have to deal with all those assholes who are fucking happy he’s dead. If you want to call me a liar, at least have the balls to pit me to my face instead of trying to hide being a cute obscure reference. Oh, and thanks for the condolences.
Now I think I’ve said what I needed to say here. I’m bowing out of this thread, as I don’t want to risk this thread going nuclear, as I have seen so happen in threads about pedophilia before, and I think I have disregarded enough legal advice for one day. If anyone wants me to continue part of this conversation, please start a new thread. I want to thank you all again for your support when I truly needed it, and for a few people calling me on my shit when I deserved it. Mostly, I want to share a big virtual hug to all those who have lost someone to suicide, and to send all the good wishes I can spare to all those who have shared their stories of loss with me. Live well my friends.
For god’s sake SHUT UP!
You just potentially further implicated yourself.
If you MUST talk about this (and I understand that need) - do what people did before message boards - write a letter and mail it to yourself.
The catharsis is in putting the thoughts and emotions into word and seeing them written.
Putting them where everybody with access to the web can see ant trace them is an incredibly bad idea.
The DOPE WILL CO-OPERATE WITH THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM - you ARE NOT anonymous!
As the OP of that thread - I’d heard someone call it the ‘cowards way out’ and wanted to know how widespread that sentiment was - I’m really sorry to hear that it caused you distress.
On preview: This thread went in a different direction than I thought it would…
Anna Quindlen’s response to Andy Rooney’s distain for Kurt Cobain’s suicide has always stuck with me.
Opinion | Public & Private; Real Pain - The New York Times [bolding mine]
“A lot of people would like to have the years left that he threw away,” Mr. Rooney said of Kurt Cobain. He went on to ridicule the young, many of whom found enlightenment of a kind through Nirvana’s music. “What’s all this nonsense about how terrible life is?” he asked, and he added, speaking rhetorically to a young woman who had wept at the suicide, “I’d love to relieve the pain you’re going through by switching my age for yours.”
I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be 17 again on a bet. I’ve known a number of young women of about that age who seemingly had everything to live for and yet who somehow wanted to die. Or perhaps not to die so much as to rest. You could lecture them about their future and their good health and fine homes and nice schools, and they would understand the rightness of the position but not, for the life of them, feel it in their souls. They would tell you that they felt always as if they carried a backpack full of bricks. And some of them can figure out only one way to put that pack down.
It’s hard to say this without sounding unfeeling to the OP, but when that fellow shot the Amish girls and then himself, because they were a source of temptation, I thought (not that I encourage suicide either, but if you’re at that point) just hurt yourself and not these poor girls.
The OP is a big boy and has been given advice both here and in real life. If, after being informed of risk(s) he elects to go ahead and take those risks that is his choice, not ours.