Etika

Etika
Etika in 2019 - 2.jpg Etika in 2019 - 2.jpg Etika in 2019
Born	Daniel Desmond Amofah (1990-05-12)May 12, 1990 Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
💀Died	c. June 19, 2019(2019-06-19) (aged 29) Manhattan, New York, U.S.c. June 19, 2019(2019-06-19) (aged 29)
Cause of death	Suicide by drowning
🏳️ Nationality	American
Other names	Etika Iceman
💼 Occupation	Twitch streamer YouTuber
📆 Years active	2012–2019
Family	Owuraku Amofah (father)

Daniel Desmond Amofah (May 12, 1990 – c. June 19, 2019), better known online as Etika, was an American YouTuber, live-streamer and former model, best known for his reactions to various Nintendo products and games.

Following several months of apparent mental health and suicidal issues, Amofah disappeared on the evening of June 19, 2019, after leaving an apologetic video to his fans on his channel. On June 24, the New York City Police Department announced that a body was found in the East River. A day later, it was confirmed it was his. Investigators later confirmed his death as suicide from drowning.

Early life

Amofah was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Owuraku Amofah, a Ghanaian politician. His father's relative (addressed by him as "uncle"), Nana Akufo-Addo, of the prominent Ghanaian Ofori-Atta family, became President of Ghana in January 2017.

Career

Prior to the Etika branding, Amofah was active in modeling and rapping. He would continue to model occasionally until 2015. Amofah started using YouTube to broadcast his gaming and reaction streams in 2012. Prior to the closure of his main channel on YouTube in 2018, he had over 800,000 followers between his YouTube and Twitch.tv channels, and within months after creating a second YouTube channel, had more than 130,000 subscribers. Amofah's content had been described as Nintendo-focused. He often streamed reactions, often over the top, to Nintendo Direct presentations, and dubbed his fans the "Joy-Con Boyz", named after the Nintendo Switch standard controllers, Joy-Con. In November 2016, two videos of Amofah's where he purported to have a Nintendo Switch console before its 2017 release were scrutinized by fans; the model he was using was 3D-printed by YouTuber Sandqvist at Etika's request.

In June 2017, Amofah revealed himself to be the victim of multiple "fake donations", or "chargebacks" of large amounts of money sent to his PayPal account via stream donations, which would hit Amofah with hundreds of dollars in processing fees.

In October 2018, he uploaded pornography to his YouTube channel, which violated YouTube's policies and led to the channel's deletion. He was also banned from Twitch that year for using a homophobic slur during a stream. After his channel was deleted, Amofah wrote cryptic messages to social media, including the statement "it was time to die", that several of followers felt were suicidal in nature, and created a small panic. Amofah took to social media that evening to confirm his well-being, along with other streamers who professed to having seen him safe and sound in person, as to allay the followers' fears. He later apologized on Reddit.

On April 16, 2019, Amofah tweeted that he was going to kill himself with a pistol he bought from a gun store in Long Island, which led to his arrest and hospitalization. Alice Pika, who had dated Amofah from 2011 to 2017, said he was fine, and that she had been "observing him all day". Days later, he posted a picture of himself holding a gun which Pika said was fake. On April 29, after tweeting various cryptic, anti-semitic, and homophobic messages, he blocked close friends of his. Later that day, he live-streamed himself getting detained by police to 19,000 viewers on Instagram Live after a concerned fan called about him. He was detained again later that week for fighting a police officer. Amofah went onto the YouTube channel DramaAlert for an interview in which he said he was the "antichrist" and that he wanted to "purge all life".

Disappearance and death

In the late evening on June 19, 2019, Amofah posted a YouTube video titled "I'm sorry" to his personal YouTube channel TR1Iceman, alluding to his suicidal thoughts as he was walking down New York City streets; in the video he admitted to having mental health issues, struggling with the attention he had been having from streaming, and apologized for pushing people away from him. In the video, Amofah said "I hope that my story maybe helps to make YouTube a better place in the future where people know boundaries and limits and how far things should go." While the video was removed from YouTube for violations of its Community Guidelines, fans reposted the video to other outlets.

He was last heard from at 8 PM that night and was reported missing to the New York Police Department (NYPD) by June 20. On June 22, his belongings were found on the pedestrian walkway of the Manhattan Bridge, including a backpack, wallet, laptop bag, cell phone, a change of clothes, and a Nintendo Switch console. On the evening of June 24, a body was observed near Pier 16, approximately half a mile (0.8 km) down the East River from where Amofah's belongings were recovered, and reported to the NYPD. By the morning of June 25, NYPD and emergency medical services had recovered the body, confirmed it was Amofah, and that he was dead by the point of recovery. A day later, it was confirmed the cause of death was suicide by drowning.

While Amofah was missing, fellow streamers and his fans tried to reach out to him to offer their help and show their appreciation of his work over the years. Several fans asked for Amofah's final video to be re-uploaded to YouTube to help memorialize him, and a Change.org petition has been started with over 380,000 signatures asking for his original channel to be restored to preserve his legacy.

External links

• Etika's channel on YouTube

This article "Etika" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Etika. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

This page exists already on Wikipedia.

---