Five days after being reported missing, YouTuber Desmond Amofah, known as Etika, has been found dead at age 29, the New York City Police Department confirmed on Tuesday.
“We regret to inform that Desmond Amofah aka Etika has been found deceased,” the NYPD’s official Twitter account posted.
The NYPD reported him missing on June 20, tweeting that Etika had been “last heard from June 19 at about 8PM by phone.”
Sources told CNN on Sunday that a backpack and phone suspected to belong to the missing blogger were recovered on the Manhattan Bridge in N.Y.C. On Monday, Amofah’s body was reportedly pulled from the East River near South Street Seaport.
Amofah was known for blogging about videogames on YouTube, where he had amassed more than 130,000 subscribers.
His fans expressed concern after Amofah posted a since-deleted video on June 19 expressing suicidal thoughts.
Amofah’s public mental health struggles started in October 2018, when he deleted all of the videos from his YouTube channel and posted a suicidal message on Reddit. Etika’s official YouTube channel was banned for posting pornographic content and violating other YouTube guidelines, and his personal Facebook and Twitter also went inactive. At the time, his ex-girlfriend Christine Allice revealed that Amofah checked into a mental hospital.
Then, in mid-April, Amofah was hospitalized after threating to kill himself, reported Newsweek.
Two weeks later, he was arrested again in Brooklyn after live-streaming an alleged threat to kill himself in his apartment. He also tweeted about nuclear weapons and posted a Photoshopped image of him pointing a gun at the camera. Emergency services took the Twitch streamer to a nearby hospital for psychiatric evaluation, according to the Brooklyn Paper.
On May 1, Amofah was taken to a mental facility again after an altercation with a police officer. The vlogger claimed two weeks later that the officer punched him after Amofah gave him the middle finger.
On Sunday, Alice expressed hope for Amofah’s return.
“At this point no body has been found so I know Etika is okay,” she tweeted. “I believe he’s going through a ‘spiritual awakening’ and his death is metaphorical. I’m still pretty sure about that unless police say otherwise. He’s always been extreme. He doesn’t want to be found, not yet anyway.”
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