Bellevue officers want to talk to any chatroom users who witnessed the man’s death, at around 3am on Saturday morning.
Police Chief John Stacey said the shooting in the Omaha suburb was reported Saturday morning by someone in Florida who heard about it online.
The man, who said he knew the victim, rang Bellevue police and said he had been in the chat Friday evening before logging off for the night.
When he logged back in Saturday morning, he told officers, people were talking about the shooting.
Police went to the Nebraska man’s Castle Ridge home at around noon on Saturday, where they found him dead in his bedroom.
The man’s computer is being examined for clues about who may have been logged into the chat room when the shooting happened, Stacey told WOWT.
Computer forensic experts have joined Bellevue Police in trying to work out exactly what happened.
Investigators won’t know for sure whether anyone witnessed the shooting until they determine how to contact people behind their chat room usernames.
Stacey added: ‘Some of the individuals on this site are known by a web name and some times those web names don’t relate to anything.’
‘We’ve never had an investigation as viral as this.
‘Where the reporting party is in one part of the country that got information from an individual from another part of the country that involved a situation that occurred here in Bellevue.’
He added that detectives have not yet determined whether the shooting was an accident or done with suicidal intent.
The man has not yet been identified and the family declined to comment so as not to interrupt the investigation.
‘My concern is for the family right now,’ Stacey told WOWT.
‘This is a private matter and they’ve suffered enough trauma. To have this thing go out over the web and viral would be devastating.’
