All this is to say that the emotional calmness he displayed in his writings leading up to his suicide says basically nothing about whether the webcam incident did or did not drive him to suicide. The strongest evidence for that link is (1) that the webcam incident is an egregious occurrence that would be inherently emotionally traumatic for anyone, and (2) that his suicide happened soon after.

A lot of the online traffic has assumed or asserted that he was closeted and that is why his distress at the webcast took such an extreme form.

If he was not closeted, then obviously he could nevertheless feel humiliated by his roommate’s actions. But in those JustUsBoys posts, he says that he is “kinda pissed” at the roommate but otherwise does not seem devastated. He indicates that he is inclined not to change roommates because his current roommate is “pretty decent” when he isn’t acting stupidly.

He says that he was not cammed having sex, but only making out with a guy. And he even has sex again in the same dorm room after he learns of the roommate’s second attempt to cam him and after sweeping the room for additional cams.

He is more upset by the reaction of a number of the roommate’s friends, which expressed disgust at homosexuality while ignoring the fact that the roommate spied, than he is about the webcast itself.

None of these posts seems to support the idea that it was the privacy violation itself that caused him to commit suicide. I think that either something serious happened in that last day or that we will learn of some issue not directly related to the roommate. We’ll just have to wait and see.

And the thing is, we may never know. Without a note, there’s really nothing to pin this down. There may not have even been another incident.

It’s very human thing for us to want to make sense out of this to find the motive, the moment, the action that sealed the deal, that tipped the scales. We can’t handle the idea that there may not be a reasonable explanation. But that may very well be the case. We crave the sort of orderly explanation that would give our minds some peace. Trust me, I know.

I found my roommate’s body when he killed himself, and I was questioned by the police. I could only offer speculation. He didn’t leave a note and he never said “I’m going to kill myself if ______ does/n’t happen.”

Maybe his date rejected him, maybe he was just under a lot of stress, maybe it was everything, maybe it was nothing, maybe, maybe, maybe. The only person who knows why, is Tyler.

I think you’re mistaken when you write: “why does everyone say that the victim was closeted …”

I’m not aware that anyone familiar with this incident is saying that Tyler was closeted. What they are saying is that he was humiliated when a sexual encounter was livestreamed without his knowledge. Whether something is traumatic or not is in the eye of the person who experiences it, not to those of us looking in from afar, so to speak.

All sorts of factors are at play in the background, possibly including possible ongoing difficulties with his roommate and the roommate’s friend, possible subsequent harassment and/or humiliation following the video livestreaming, maybe the reaction of Tyler’s sexual partner to these events.

You’re right, there is probably a lot we don’t know. Tyler’s last post on JustUsBoys was before 7:00 am on Wednesday morning. He killed himself at 9:00 at night. That’s more than “only hours later.” A whole day, more or less, went by in between. An entire day of classes, conversations, encounters, … who knows what was said or what happened in those fourteen or so hours.

I wish the mainstream media would go into the respective high school systems and find out what support LGBT kids get there.

Second mystery: Was he even cammed having sex? His posts to JustUsBoys expressly deny that the cam caught anything other than a make-out session. I don’t see why he would downplay the incident on a website where he was posting anonymously and was seeking advice. Although having your make-out session cammed is still an invasion of privacy, it is surely much less traumatic than being cammed having intercourse.
If he isn’t closeted and only got cammed kissing someone, that would jibe with the general tone of his JustUsBoys posts, where he says that he is “kinda pissed” at the roommate but is not devastated or despondent.

Yet he killed himself only hours later. Clearly there is an important element of this story that has yet to be reported.