Desmond “Etika” Amofah is a reasonably known streamer, especially in the Super Smash Bros. community, where he’s known for his over-the-top reactions to Super Smash Bros. trailers. The crowning pinnacle of which is his reaction to the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate E3 2018 trailer, where he smashed one of his shelves apart upon seeing Snake returning. Much more over-the-top and not funny at all is his increasingly strange behavior on Twitter, which culminated in him getting detained, for his own sake.

On the 29th, Amofah went on a bizarre tangent of tweets, displaying delusions of godhood and anime villain-esque threats, rambling about social Darwinism and cleansing the Earth. Of these increasingly threatening tweets, Etika at one point tweeted something antisemitic (captured by @Slasher), which was actually deleted. However, he still has a tweet using homophobic language up on his timeline. This episode led to a lot of concern among his confused followers. Some of his more personal friends, such as @SkyWilliams attempted to reach out to him, only to discover that he had blocked them, rejecting their help.

Eventually, somebody tried to take a more direct approach to help Amofah and contacted the NYPD to check in on him. In response, Amofah took to Instagram and started live streaming what was going on. He recorded officers knocking on his door to check on him and his repeated refusals as the street outside of his apartment got closed off.

His Instagram audience, which grew to 19,000 viewers at its peak, frequently questioned his behavior and told him to let the police into his apartment. Amofah dismissed the concerns of his viewers, insisting that he was fine while displaying paranoid behavior, believing that the police want to kill him and that he’s being swatted. Eventually, Amofah started shouting, “The revolution will not be televised!” outside and publicly plugged his Instagram as comments hollered at him to stop, continuing to express concern.

Amofah continued to ignore demands from fans and officials to open the door for a while, with parts of his door getting gradually removed. After Amofah casually got himself some salad, the NYPD eventually managed to force the doors open and detained him. Amofah chanted “Joy Con Boyz,” in reference to his community, as he was taken to the ambulance.

This was not the first time Amofah displayed concerning behavior. Mere weeks ago, on April 16th, he tweeted a small, strange series of tweets not unlike the stuff he said on the 29th; culminating in a tweet where he said that he bought a gun to shoot himself with. Afterward, he disappeared from Twitter until the 25th, when he returned to brush his behavior off as “edgy shock humor.” In the interim, his (now former) friend, @TheAlicePika, assured people that he was still alive and tweeted a picture of him. She contacted the police to take him away to get him some help, though it’s not clear what happened to him during this period.

However, far before that on October 9th of last year, he got his YouTube channel removed for uploading porn and posted, “And now, it’s my turn to die. I love you all. Keep fighting for me, ok?” on his Reddit. Like the later incident, he returned, dismissing concerns for his safety as an overreaction. These events show that Amofah’s behavior on the 29th is hardly new. In fact, a representative of the NYPD that spoke to Kotaku confirmed that “He’s got a psych history.”

More than 5 hours after his last tweet, Amofah came back. However, his detainment had not changed his behavior, which is unsurprising considering how fast he got out. As of this writing, he is still tweeting strange things intermixed with retweets of people covering the incident, people sincerely siding with him, and the occasional porn retweet. All this may not be the behavior of somebody looking for attention, but may be the behavior of somebody that needs help. However, while he does need help, mental illness should not be conflated with the more harmful things he said.

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