Last Picture of Tragic Internet Guru: Reddit Founder's Girlfriend Tells of Their Last Hours

Aaron Swartz's girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman tells of the moment she found him hanging at their Brooklyn apartment in first interview.

Last meal: Aaron Swartz and girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman shared a dinner of his favourite foods on the night before he hanged himself

(LONDON The Daily Mail) - Taren insists Swartz killed himself because he was 'tired' of facing up to a merciless justice system that has 'lost all sense of mercy' and is driven by 'vindictiveness'.

Swartz thought he faced up to 35 years in jail for breaking into and attempting to illegally download academic files from MIT

Aaron, 26, was charged last September with wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer after he allegedly tried to steal millions of scholarly papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in January 2009.  The charges saw him face a maximum jail term of 35 years.

He was caught on CCTV installed by MIT investigators who had become suspicious that somebody was illegally downloading material from JSTOR – an archive of academic journals that universities, including MIT, pay vast amounts to access.

Aaron had wired a laptop and hard drive directly into the MIT network and was filmed apparently attempting to retrieve them.

Speaking to MailOnline today Taren said: ‘The night before he died,  Aaron really wanted to go to a bar called Spitzers Corner in the Lower East Side. I was tired and didn’t want to but he insisted. He wanted to go to the Happy Hour so he got me out and we went.’

The picture of Taren, 31, and Aaron together that night is the last ever taken of him.

Shocking discovery: Taren found Aaron hanged at the Brooklyn apartment they shared saying:'I found him. I don¿t know when he did it. I guess it doesn't really matter now.'

Taren said: ‘Aaron was tired that night. I was a bit concerned. But we shared a grilled cheese sandwich and mac and cheese, his absolute favourite foods.  It was the best we’d ever had.

The next morning Taren, Executive Director of corporate watchdog SumOfUs, rose for work and assumed that Aaron would travel with her to their office as he always did. Their lengthy subway rides were, she said, times when they would talk and kiss and argue loudly about  philosophical issues.

She said: ‘We used to joke we must be completely obnoxious to everyone else sitting quietly, trying to read or listen to music.’

But though he awoke and dressed on Friday morning Aaron didn’t travel with Taren. ‘I left for work around 9am and he said he was going to stay home and rest instead.

‘I wanted to stay with him but he said he didn’t want me to and that I should go to the office. So I did.’

Taren tried to call Aaron several times that day. She had arranged to have dinner with a close friend of theirs thinking it would ‘cheer him up.’

On film: Aaron Swartz was caught soon afterwards this video taken at MIT was recorded on January 6 2011 with a laptop and a hard drive that contained secured and lucrative academic journals that had been hacked

‘I went home at 7pm to get him to go to the dinner. I thought he was probably just asleep,’ she remembered.

Instead she walked into the Brooklyn apartment which they had shared for the past seven months and found Aaron dead. He had strangled himself with his belt.

Her voice breaking and almost inaudibly soft, Taren said simply: ‘I found him. I don’t know when he did it. I guess it doesn’t really matter now.’

In the days since that awful discovery Taren and Aaron’s family, his parents Robert and Susan and siblings Noah and Ben, have railed against the legal system which they blame for the sense of hopelessness that led Aaron to take his own life.

Taren said: ‘I know a lot of people have said that he suffered from depression before. Honestly when I was dating him I never thought that he was depressed. He was like an adolescent guy going through growing pains you know? He’d have got through it.

‘He was stressed out and angry and tired for a long time but he was going on with his life in many other ways. He was continuing his activism and doing research projects.’

But, in the last few days, she said the case had ‘clearly taken its toll.’

She added: ‘I am absolutely confident that this was triggered by the case.

In his eulogy at his son’s funeral in the small synagogue in Highland Park, III, a suburb north of Chicago, Robert Swartz voiced a similar view saying: ‘He was killed by the government and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.’

Expected to dinner: Taren said she returned home to their apartment wanting to take Aaron out to a friends' house
to cheer him up - but found him dead

On 9 January, just two days before Aaron committed suicide, his request for a plea deal was turned down by federal prosecutors. Elliot Peters, Swartz’s lawyer spoke to the Massachusetts attorney’s office to see if a plea bargain could be reached that would reduce the prison time and $1million fines that his client was facing for allegedly stealing academic papers.

The U.S Attorney Carmen M Ortiz issued a statement on Aaron’s death on Wednesday evening, extending her sympathy to his family and friends and defending her office’s conduct saying:  ‘I must…make it clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case.

‘The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold and did so reasonably.’

She went on to state that the prosecutors recognised that Aaron’s actions were not for ‘personal financial gain’ and that for that reason ‘did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines.’ 

According to Mrs Ortiz her office would have viewed ‘six months in a low security setting,’ as ‘an appropriate sentence.’

Taren is unmoved by the U.S Attorney’s assertion. Regardless of how ‘lenient’ or otherwise the sentence sought – and she pointed out that it is for the judge to decide in any event – it was the very fact that he was being pursued for a felony that ultimately proved too much for her boyfriend.

Anger: Aaron's family expressed their fury at his funeral last weekend directed at the government and MIT

She said: ‘Felony charges change the course of people’s lives. There are things Aaron maybe wanted to do – like go into government – and it’s just ludicrous that one act like this could prevents somebody like him from serving his country. The risk was too much for him.’

Poignantly, Taren believes, Aaron’s final act was due in part to coming back to the reality of the case after a particularly happy period over the New Year. For a while they had escaped as a couple, with friends.

She recalled: ‘We went on vacation over New Year. We went to Burlington with a bunch of friends and stayed in a house and played in the snow. It was wonderful.

‘Coming back and coming to terms with everything that he was facing just left Aaron so tired.’ 

Whatever the outcome of any trial, the felony charge was what convinced Aaron that his future had already closed like a fist.

Worn out: Aaron, pictured here in his booking photograph, was 'tired out' by facing up to 35 years in jail for the break-in

But, Taren said, ‘I feel that Aaron’s friends and family deserve to know that he had lots of happy moments in his last few weeks. As well as the world needing to hear the systemic problems that led to his death people need to know that we had lots of happy moments together.’

It is why Taren delivered a eulogy at his funeral, why she is speaking now and why she will speak again at the memorial service in Aaron’s honour in New York on Saturday. Other services are scheduled to be held in San Francisco, Washing DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Aaron's genuis has been recognised by some of the most revered in his field. Speaking at Aaron's funeral, internet inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said: 'World wanderers we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all we have lost a child, let us weep.'

At just 14, Aaron assisted Berners-Lee in the founding of RSS - one of the earliest ways that data on the internet was freed from the websites that provided it. Aaron's brilliance and his ethos chimed with that of Berners Lee whose first internet message was, 'This is for everyone.'

For Taren, Aaron's dazzling combination of intellect and conviction is what first drew her to him as they met through a mutual friend and their shared passion for campaigning. As well as co-founding Reddit, Aaron was an energetic campaigner for free access to information on the internet.

Taren said: ‘I was working on a project a mutual friend thought Aaron would be interested in. We spoke over the phone a few times but the first time we really spent any time together was after the 2010 Elections when he volunteered for a campaign I was working on. 

‘I couldn’t tell whether he was flirting with me or not. I asked my friend and his response was, “Well would it be good if he was?” I said, “Yes, probably.”’

Ultimately it was Taren who made the first move, asking Aaron out for a date, though he chose the Chinese restaurant where their relationship really began. That was June 2011.

The couple lived in different cities until about eight months ago – she in Washington, he in Boston – when they moved to New York.

‘He loved reading to me,’ Taren recalled. ‘He was a really terrible cook. He couldn’t figure out how to cut potatoes that’s how bad he was so I was teaching him slowly but for the most part I would make dinner and he would read to me while I was doing it – a blog post or a chat-book chapter.’

Occasionally he would ‘crack out what cooking skills he had’ and make pancakes for his best friend’s nine-year-old daughter.

Whiz kid: At age 14, Swartz, right, co-authored an early version of RSS and later he started Infogami, a company that would eventually merge with Reddit

Taren laughs at the memory of those culinary attempts. ‘Aaron wanted to know everything there was to know, that was his curiosity. He wanted to change the world with that knowledge as much as possible, that was his ambition. But he was extremely humble about knowing what he didn’t know.

‘He could do all the research in the world and build the most powerful organisation in the world and he could still make mistakes. And he still would make mistakes.’

But he was not, she said, a criminal who deserved to be pursued by the State in the way he was.

Right now, for Taren and Aaron’s family and friends sometimes just thinking beyond the next day is hard but, she said: ‘There is a goal here that matters. That goal is to change the law under which Aaron was being prosecuted and which is so completely  ambiguous and unjust.

‘People are vastly overcharged to the point where, last year I think, only 3 per cent of cases actually went to trial. People opt for plea bargains whether they’re guilty or not because they think trial is not an option.

Honour: Taren said she'll campaign to change the laws governing what she called 'overcharging' of felony suspects

‘We have a notion of our legal system based on history books and Law and Order but it’s not like that. The system is completely unjust.’

In many ways, Taren reflected, Aaron was ‘one of the privileged ones’ who had a public profile and public support. But even that wasn’t enough to counteract the tremendous pressure he was under.

‘His friends and my friends have been amazing,’ she added. ‘It’s hard to imagine how it could be any worse right now but I’m sure it could without them.’

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