Student wrongly tied to Boston bombings found dead

A body pulled from the water off India Point Park in Rhode Island has been identified as the Brown University student mistakenly linked by amateur sleuths on a social media site to the Boston bombings, writes Doug Stanglin for USA Today.

The body of 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi was identified through dental records, Health Department spokesperson Dara Chadwick said on Thursday. It was not immediately clear when Tripathi, who was last seen on 15 March, died. The cause of death has also not been determined. Police said that no signs of trauma were found initially and that the investigation could take months.

After the 15 April bombings of the Boston Marathon, crowd-sourcing groups drawing on photos released by the FBI of a suspect, erroneously reported via Reddit, a social news website, that the person in a baseball cap strongly resembled the missing student. At one point, Tripathi's name landed on the Twitter top trends list.
Full report on the USA Today site