What led to Gregory Tomkins a British plasterer live-streaming his suicide on insult webchat forum, Apple Inc Insults on Christmas Day?
Gregory Tomkins a 39 year old London plasterer has died after live-streaming his suicide on a US chatroom Christmas Day dedicated to members insulting each other.
The British man’s death came as one user told of desperately trying to get someone to call emergency services after watching Tomkins hang himself on webcam.
The dailymail reported the chatroom administrator known as Throat Punch watching futilely as he had no idea where the Sutton man, from south London, lived and begging UK-base users of the internet forum to dial 999.
He said by the time emergency services arrived at Greogry’s home, it was too late.
Gregory was a frequent user of infamous chatroom Apple Inc Insults. The forum is one of 5,000 on controversial video social site PalTalk and encourages users to verbally abuse one another as much as they can.
To what degree the nature of the forum may have elicited the self-employed plasterer’s suicide death wasn’t immediately apparent. How or why Tomkins came to choose the particular forum to associate online was also not clear.
The software is used by more than 7 million people worldwide has been previously criticized for helping terrorists to communicate.
Told Throat Punch, ‘As an admin in the room at the time this tragedy took place, the frustration of not being able to contact police because dialing 101 or 999 from a country outside the UK became immediately apparent.’
‘By the time it took me to get a room member from the UK to contact 999, it was way too late.
‘Sitting by watching people ignore requests to call police was truly futile.’
Gregory Tomkins UK plasterer: ‘A lovely guy with a difficult past’.
Online contacts described Gregory, a regular to the site, as a ‘lovely soul’, but said the internet chatroom where you got to get insulted was ‘not the place for him’.
He is thought to have entered the chatroom in the early hours of Christmas Day but instead of speaking, as he usually did, remained silent.
An anonymous individual told of Gregory slowly panning away from the camera and within seconds, having hung himself.
Told the individual: ‘He had come into the room on his regular screenname that he uses.
‘When he actually comes in the room he is always on the microphone and he talks.
‘But this time he didn’t talk and he was just sitting there. After he left the room he camed up, and that was when he did what he did.
‘It took him literally 30 seconds to go from sitting down to hanging.’
One person known on the forum as Putin wrote: ‘Gregory Tomkins was a funny man, he did a lot of funny stuff in the chat room but he also got upset a lot and would do silly things on his cam as well.
‘I just think he was very lonely as he had a difficult past which he spoke about a lot.
‘But he always meant well, you just were never sure what mood he was in when he entered the chat room. I do not think an insult chat room like this was the place for him.’
Told chatroom user, Alinity: ‘Yakka was a funny guy he will be sadly missed.’
Gregory Tomkins livestreams suicide: Had run-ins with local police.
Residents in the quiet suburban street in south London said Tomkins had run-ins with the police.
Next-door neighbour Janine Harmer, 38, said she heard banging from Mr Tomkins top-floor flat around 3.30 am on Christmas Day.
Ms. Harmer said: ‘There was a lot of banging. I did not know what was going on. It went on for a few minutes.
‘The bedroom is at the back.Its really bonkers. I sad to my boyfriend, ‘Is somebody building an ark in there?’
‘He used to play his music really loud at all hours. Sunday at 8am, late into the night. It was dancey, garage music.’
One local who had lived in the street for eight years said Mr Tomkins was ‘a bit of a loose canon’.
He said: ‘I think he had some dealings with the police. Occasionally they would be here. He would shout out the window at people passing by. He maybe had some mental issues.
‘No one knew.much about him. It’s really sad.’
On Thursday afternoon, Mr Tomkins white Mercedes work van was still parked outside the three-story converted house.
Neighbors reported seeing him drive home the vehicle day around 5.45pm.
One resident which lives in the flat below said ‘I did not see him very much’.
The neighbor, who asked not to be named, said: ‘He lived alone here for a long time. He was a very private person.’
To date it remains unclear what efforts the man made to deal with his depression and who may have been available for Tomkins, if anyone, in his hour of need….
PalTalk chatroom forum has yet to publicly respond to Tomkins’s suicide death.
