Family blames prosecutors for Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's death
14 Jan 2013
The family of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in New York, is blaming prosecutors for his death. The internet prodigy was to go on trial on charges of having stolen millions of scholarly articles.
Swartz killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday night, according to his family and authorities.
The 26-year-old championed free online content for the public and in his teens helped create RSS, a family of web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.
In 2011, he was charged with stealing millions of scientific journals from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a bid to make them freely available.
He had pleaded not guilty, and his federal trial was to begin next month. A conviction would have fetched him decades in prison in addition to a fortune in fines.
In a statement released Saturday, the internet prodigy's family in Chicago expressed grief over his death as also bitterness toward federal prosecutors pressing charges against him in Massachusetts.
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