Yahoo Sports 
Ticats' signee Adrian Robinson's death was suicide, not the shooting TMZ reported
Tragedy struck the CFL this weekend with the death of Adrian Robinson Jr., a 25-year-old former NFL linebacker who had signed with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats as a defensive lineman earlier this offseason. Sadly, that tragedy was further amplified through erroneous reporting from TMZ. Following Robinson's death Saturday night, TMZ reported that his death came in a shooting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Robinson's hometown. It turns out they had everything in that story wrong, as the Philadelphia medical examiner's office confirmed to PennLive Sunday that Robinson hanged himself in Philadelphia. How did TMZ get this so wrong? Barry Petchesky has a good analysis of that at Deadspin, discussing how TMZ took a response from a Harrisburg police sergeant saying Robinson wasn't involved in a particular shooting to mean that he was involved in another shooting:
The police sergeant never specifically addressed Robinson, only noted that the shooting on North 2nd street—which was first brought up by the TMZ producer—did not involve Robinson in any way. TMZ took the sergeant’s terse clarification as confirmation that Robinson had been killed in a separate shooting, but the presumption that there was a separate shooting turned out to be faulty to begin with. In retrospect, they saw a confirmation only because they were expecting one.
That confirmation led to a massively false report that had the wrong method of death, the wrong city and the wrong circumstances, and that report gained significant traction through other media outlets repeating it. Those outlets aren't necessarily in the wrong to do so; if the information's being put out there by an outlet with the reach of TMZ, it's hard not to discuss it even with a grain of salt, and TMZ does break some scoops accurately (as they did with the Ray Rice video). This story shows the problems with relying on incomplete information in an effort to be first, though, allowing confirmation bias to kick in. TMZ could have reached out to Robinson's agent to try and confirm their story, or they could have asked the Harrisburg police better questions (such as "Was Robinson's death in your city?"). They didn't, and thus they caused bad information to be spread and likely caused more pain for Robinson's family and friends.
Robinson's loss will be felt by the CFL community, and by the larger football community. Although he never actually played a down for the Tiger-Cats, it's still a blow to that team and its players to hear this about someone they were expecting to work with this year. Robinson also undoubtedly knew players in the CFL, whether from competing with or against them in college (he was a star at Temple University) or in the NFL (he had stints with Pittsburgh, Denver, San Diego and Washington). The football world's a small one, and a loss like this will echo across it. It's made even worse by the poor initial reports, though, and this situation shows just how careful media outlets should be when reporting deaths.
A list of suicide prevention resources across Canada can be found here.
