John McAfee, 75, was found dead in a Barcelona prison cell hours after a Spanish court agreed to extradite him to the U.S. to face tax evasion charges.
In a statement, the Catalan justice department said that attempts to revive McAfee were unsuccessful. “Everything points to death by suicide,” the statement added.
Less than an hour after McAfee’s apparent suicide was reported, his Instagram account posted a large “Q” with no caption or explanation. The Q stands for QAnon.
His account has since been deleted.
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WHAT THE QANON FOLLOWING BELIEVE
Newsweek wrote a brief summary of what QAnon folks are saying.
MelQ, a QAnon advocate with 139,000 subscribers on Telegram, wrote: “There is possibly a Key code to a dead mans switch. A file that has damning evidence against the deep state, that is to be unlocked at the time of his death. We will see if this pans out. Only time will tell.”
However, as noted by QAnon John, real name John Sabal who recently organized the major QAnon conference in Dallas, Texas, the code is actually metadata that Facebook, which owns Instagram, uses on all photos.
“It’s an internal copyrighting tool used to track photo usage,” Sabal wrote. “Also, John McAfee did not commit suicide.”
Former 8kun administrator Ron Watkins, who denies being the de-facto leader of the movement known as Q, speculated that McAfee may still be alive and also have a dead man’s switch without referring to the Instagram post.
“Regarding John McAfee: He was in jail. He has a dead man switch. He ‘died’. His dead man switch has not (yet) activated,” Watkins wrote on Telegram.
“We will know soon if he is really dead, or managed to escape from prison under the guise of a ‘suicide’ [i.e. Epstein.]”
However, one QAnon telegram account with more than 75,000 subscribers was more cautious about commenting on the “Q” Instagram post and the possibility of a dead man’s switch.
“Take the John McAfee stuff lightly. It could’ve very easily been a little publicity stunt to go out on. The deltas are fascinating but don’t hold your breath on this guy’s deadman switch,” the Qtah account wrote.
“Those who claim to have blackmail that he claimed to have are sitting in high places, not running from the law or the deep state.”
MCAFEE’S MESSAGES
The QAnon followers noted that McAfee has previously claimed he had no intention of killing himself and his death must be treated as suspicious in previous tweets to back up their claims he may not have taken his own life.
“Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: ‘We’re coming for you McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself.’ I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm,” John McAfee wrote while sharing an image of his “$WHACKD” tattoo in November 2019.
In an October 2020 tweet sent while he was in a Barcelona jail, John McAfee added: “I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.”
THE WILD LIFE OF JOHN MCAFEE
Business Insider ran a bio on him in 2015.
According to the report, McAfee built one of the biggest antivirus companies to date, and yet it’s what happened after that made him a legend. McAfee once lived in Belize and allegedly got caught up with drugs and other illegal activities.
His father, a railroad surveyor, was an alcoholic who killed himself when McAfee was 15. It haunted him throughout his life.
McAfee went to Roanoke College and sold magazines door-to-door, making him a small fortune.
He began working at a company that coded punch-card systems in the late ’60s. This taught him the basics of early computing. Using this information, he landed a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad, where he helped the company use a new IBM computer system to help calibrate train schedules.
By that time, he had taken up alcohol and moved on to hard drugs.
He took a whole bag of drugs and had such a bad trip he thought he never left that trip throughout his life. He never returned to Missouri Pacific Railroad.
McAfee took various computer jobs and finally sought help for his drug and alcohol problem in 1983.
While at Lockheed in the 80s, viruses started to hit and he began his McAfee anti-virus company.
When the virus Michaelangelo hit, he told people it would infect millions of computers. It made his company a huge success. The virus later only attacked tens of thousands of computers.
In 1994, he sold his company for $100 million. He gave advice, lectured, and worked on two programs that never hit the market.
In 2008, his fortune dwindled to $4 million due to the economic collapse. That’s when he moved to Belize to work on vaccines but began to fear he was being watched all the time.
He spent his days in the poor part of town, watching people. At that point, he said he had no connection to polite society.
When his friend Gregory Faull was shot to death, he was named as a person of interest.
He was arrested in Guatemala and, after a series of heart-related issues, was eventually sent back to the US.
In 2013, he uploaded a bizarre video entitled “How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus.” It showed him surrounded by scantily clad women while trying to uninstall the software he invented, which he denounced after leaving the company. The video also showed guns and allusions to drugs and drug use, although it was undoubtedly meant to be some sort of parody.
He moved to Portland where he remained until the taxmen came calling, and he fled the country.
MACAFFEE’S DEATH
McAfee was arrested in Spain. He had been in the Barcelona prison for nearly nine months. He was sent there on October 4, 2020, when he was arrested by the National Police after US prosecutors accused McAfee of tax evasion. During these months, McAfee’s behavior was exemplary, according to sources from the penitentiary.
Tech mogul John McAfee spent his final hours alone inside his jail cell in a Spanish prison, distraught over the decision earlier Wednesday to extradite him to the US on tax evasion charges, the NY Post reported.
The 75-year-old antivirus software tycoon had complained to Spanish authorities that he was in poor health and feared that he would spend the remainder of his life behind bars, according to a report in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
Around 4 p.m. Wednesday, he had asked to go to his cell, which was empty because his cellmate was not there at the time, the newspaper said.
Two hours later, guards found him hanging in the cell in an apparent suicide. McAfee was declared dead after prison officials were unable to resuscitate him.
Officials at the Brians 2 prison in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires said McAfee had not been considered a suicide threat, which would have called for 24-hour supervision.
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