Man accused of mass suicide plot
A man used an internet chatroom to try to set up a mass suicide on Valentine’s Day involving as many as 32 people across the United States and Canada, police said.
Gerald Krein, 26, was arrested at his mother’s mobile home in Klamath Falls, Oregon and faces charges of solicitation to commit murder, sheriff’s deputies said.
Investigators are subpoenaing chatroom records to try to contact people who may have planned to take part in the suicide.
Detectives learned of the plan from a woman in Canada who said she saw the message in a Yahoo chatroom that had the words “Suicide Ideology” in the title.
The unnamed woman told detectives she was going to take part in the suicide but had second thoughts when another chatroom participant said she would commit suicide and talked about killing her two children before taking her own life, said Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger.
“Our primary goal is to try to locate where these endangered children might be,” Evinger said. “We need to investigate where these other computers are. Hopefully we can intervene if anyone still has the notion to follow through with this.”
District Attorney Ed Caleb said he was taking the matter seriously.
“There is always a chance this is a joke, but our position is in this world, any time a person makes these kinds of overt actions, they need to be looked into,” he said.
Thomas Boone, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at St John’s University in New York, said Valentine’s Day could be a powerful psychological trigger for lonely people.
“Valentine’s Day is one those things where people say, ‘I should have someone with me’,” Boone said. “Then they go look for someone.
“Often times these are people of low self-esteem. They get involved with someone more powerful, who has got charisma and seems to have the answer.”
