Justin Bieber fans vandalize Rick Rypien Memorial

No one should be bullied? So its okay for her to bully Ryp’s memorial with pen but not okay for us to make comments on her outrageous and stupid behaviour!! No its not okay! She’s not young and innocent. If she was, she wouldn’t have vandalized the memorial. Her parents really taught her well, to have no respect. Those girls will get karma and it will be a glorious day when they do.

Thank you for the remaining calm comment. Internet posters have gone crazy crying for these fans heads. Who are the real monsters here? I’d say the fake internet poseurs that lash out at anyone and anything and then hide behind their laptops.

Use words to heal — not criticize and condemn

Mob mentality response, but hey, it was Canucks fans who rioted too… You can’t “fight fire with fire”. Calling the girl an idiot is fine, but people on twitter have been threatening her life (really people?). I was as disgusted with the rioting as most other people, but I wasn’t threatening retribution against the rioters like a lot of people were. Apparently idiocy begets idiocy…

No one is defending them, but writing “I love Justin Bieber” or “I was at the Bieber concert” is nowhere near as bad as trashing the city and looting stores, so let’s stop comparing the two. As I said to another commenter, there are far worse things that could have been written so let’s get a little perspective here.

Maybe there needs to be a sign beside the memorial wall explaining what it is and why only messages about Rick Rypien should be written on the wall because I’m sure if these kids realized what exactly it was that they were writing on, they probably wouldn’t have written on it.

It looks to me like they were just ignorant of the fact it was a memorial. It was probably one person who wrote on what looked to be a wall of graffiti and everyone else followed suit. These are just young kids who didn’t know any better. I am sure they know their lesson know after having their lives threatened. This is just another black eye for hockey fans if you ask me and more evidence of the fact that they have a terrible mob mentality. Is it ok to write on a memorial? No. Do you know that they understood it was a memorial or are you making that assumption? You don’t ruin a person’s life over this. 

Did everybody forget that Rick Rypien committed suicide because he was clinically depressed?  I agree that it was wrong of the Bieber fans to vandalize the memorial, but it doesn’t mean that they should be threatened. The same day this happened, a girl named Amanda committed suicide in Coquitlam due to cyberbullying. We need to realize that words have a lot of power. People make mistakes. There are better ways of dealing with this then sending hateful backlash.

I was there at the concert last night and honestly I don’t see why any one of the 80 thousand girls there would’ve done such a thing. The majority of the people there were also Canucks fans so they definitely should know of the memorial. It was probably just “mob mentality” as they say. You have to think about what sort of emotions must have been going through this person. The place was absolutely nuts after the concert. This person shouldn’t be hated on, you don’t even know who it is. Once she or he see’s this, they probably will apologize. Get over it.

It was a young girl that did that. She likely wasn’t very old, likely doesn’t follow hockey closely either. What she saw on the pillar could have just been perceived as notes people leave behind times they go to concerts or events at Rogers Arena. There’s a chance she probably doesn’t know who Rypien even was. 

I doubt the kids there were able to decipher this makeshift memorial (at the time, and still kind of is) from any other type of graffiti or writing on a wall. 

“I didn’t know” seems more like a valid response in this situation compared to the adults who looted downtown and justified it by claiming didn’t realize what they were doing was wrong at the time.

Plus last time I checked nowhere along the pillar does it say “Rick Rypien Memorial”, they need to get something up there so people who aren’t aware know what it’s about.

But hey, death threats against what I can only imagine are 13-17 year old girls is completely warranted by the grounds of “vandalism”. hah.

Again, yes it’s bad that it happened and it could have been prevented had that been an official memorial for Rypien. If you think the kids at the concert (A Justin Bieber concert at that) intentionally “bullied” a makeshift memorial, you’re out of your mind. 

But I see where some of these people are coming from, at 13 these kids should be aware of what happened in the hockey world a year ago. Walk down the street downtown tomorrow and ask all the adults you see if there’s a Rick Rypien memorial in town anywhere, you’ll be lucky to have 20% of the people know about the pillar.

If you saw a wall with “Rick Rypien you were a warrior, thank you for everything” and you had no idea who Rick Rypien was and you’re outside a stadium, how easy is it to mistake that for a wall of thanks?