A Downtown Brooklyn resident and popular YouTube personality was found dead on Monday, just a few days after posting a disturbing online video and then vanishing, police confirmed.
Cops discovered 29-year-old Desmond Amofah — best known by his YouTube channel, Etika, where he posted videos of himself playing video games — in the East River off Manhattan’s Pier 16 at 6:18 p.m., just a few hundred yards downstream of the Brooklyn Bridge.
However, police reportedly located items belonging to Amofah on the Manhattan Bridge, including his wallet, identification cards, a Nintendo Switch gaming console, his laptop bag, and clothes, a law enforcement source told Inside Edition. A spokesman for the department could not confirm those details.
An investigation by the city’s Chief Medical Examiner concluded that Amofah killed himself by drowning, according to spokeswoman Aja Worthy-Davis.
Amofah was last heard alive during a phone conversation on June 19, which occurred shortly after he posted a Youtube video in which he discussed suicide and his struggles with mental illness.
“I wasn’t suicidal before, but one thing I didn’t realize was the walls were closing around me so fast. I really had no intention of killing myself, but I would always push it too far. I guess I am mentally ill,” Desmond Amofah said in a June 19 video deleted by YouTube, but which pro-gamer Rod Breslau preserved on Twitter.
The late online personality was cuffed last April after he took to Instagram and live-streamed an alleged threat to kill himself inside his apartment, which caused police to barricade the street outside his home for hours.
The police’s investigation into Amofah’s death remains ongoing, a department spokesman told this paper.
