His classmates began graduating and leaving town. He went on an academic leave, but stayed in Providence, taking odd jobs and sharing an apartment with some friends. Phone calls were fewer and far between, and his schoolwork and music faltered. And he called his mother nearly every night, mindful of her empty nest back home.īut in his third year, a fog settled in. He pursued those passions at Brown, thriving in his first two years. They gave him a moon necklace as protection - a pendant that Judy occasionally wore through his childhood. Hindu priests had blessed the boy in his earliest days, warning that the stars were bad when Sunil was born, she recalled. Sunil, she said, had always been the baby of the family. Her children are there in every stage of life: babies laughing from collages on the walls, kids hugging each other inside picture frames on every table, grownups smiling serenely from photographs pinned up over the doorways. Her grandkids, barely 2 months and 3 years old, smile from the refrigerator door. Inside, photos of her family are everywhere. She’s a slight, gracious woman in her 70s, haloed by a cloud of soft brown curls and still easily brought to tears. On a cold afternoon last month, nearly 10 years to the day her son vanished, Judy Tripathi welcomed a reporter into her home in the Philadelphia suburbs. Days after the Marathon bombing on April 15, the Tripathis would have to shut down the Facebook page. Judy Tripathi and her family turned to social media to get the Brown University student’s name and face out to the public, encouraging family and friends to post messages of support. A misinformed hunch led to a spike in speculation on message boards, which led to widespread musing, and to some in the media publicly identifying the 22-year-old student by name. Their basis: Blurry photos shared by the FBI had made their way around the Internet and took hold in a dark corner of Reddit, where amateur sleuths tried to make sense of them. They called Sunil a terrorist, lobbed expletives, accused him of acting on behalf of Al Qaeda. Then, a phone call from a reporter with an oblique question: Had they seen photos from the Boston bombing? Had they heard from Sunil? A few comments popped up, linking Sunil to the Marathon. Three days after the bombs exploded, as the family milled in their rented Providence apartment, a laptop started to ding with notifications from Facebook. “It just felt like tragedy on top of tragedy,” Judy recalled. The Tripathis had been planning another social media campaign to spread Sunil’s name but, in light of the bombing, decided to wait a few days. None of them were hurt, but the trio drove back to Providence shaken and confused. They camped out near the midpoint of the Marathon and cheered and exchanged hugs when their friend flew by.īut minutes after he finished the race, two bombs exploded near the finish line.
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