26-year-old Aaron Swartz, a computer prodigy turned Internet activist, was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment on Friday. He committed suicide by hanging.

Swartz, the founder of Reddit as well the co-founder of the RSS 1.0 specifications at 14, and also co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign committee.

He was due to go to court on federal charges for stealing nearly five million articles from the computer archive at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Swartz was facing 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud, and obtaining information from a protected computer.

Swartz had pleaded “Not Guilty,” his next court date would have been on January 25th of January and his trial was to begin next month.

In 2011, Swartz, a Harvard Fellow, was caught after investigators determined that someone was downloading massive amounts of files from the JSTOR archives at the Institute. The investigators tracked the equipment to a wiring closet in the basement and found a computer and an external hard drive concealed there under cardboard.

Figuring that the owner of the computer would return, hidden cameras were set up in the closet. Swartz was seen entering and exiting the closet on three successive days. On the last day, Swartz was seen entering the closet with a bicycle helmet covering his face, packing up the computer and hard drive and then leaving the closet. An MIT tracked him down as he was riding near the campus and attempted to stop Swartz, who abandoned his bike and fled on foot. Soon after he was caught by an MIT officer and Secret Service Agent Michael Pickett.

Swartz was originally charged in District Court with breaking and entering, but when federal prosecutors took over the case, they filed a multitude of charges against Swartz. With these new federal charges,Swartz now faced up to 35 years in prison.

After Swartz turned over the files to JSTOR, JSTOR refused to press charges in the case, JSTOR would go further, and just two days before the death of Swartz, JSTOR announced that they would release 4.5 million articles to the public to be free for use.

But federal prosecutors, led by Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, moved forward with the case anyway.

Ortiz, when he announced the idictment of Swartz in July, 2011 said, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” But, when contacted, Ortiz’s office refused to comment, saying they wanted to respect the privacy of the family at this time.

The public has critisized the way that the federal government pursued and prosecuted the case, and many have characterized the feds case as over-reaching and absurd.

Lawrence Lessig, Copyright Expert and Harvard Law Professor, wrote in a blog post on Saturday, “From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way,” Lessig wrote. “The ‘property’ Aaron had ‘stolen,’ we were told, was worth ‘millions of dollars’ — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar.” Lessig continued in his post, “Somehow, we need to get beyond the ‘I’m right so I’m right to nuke you’ ethics that dominates our time.”

On Saturday, Swartz’s family made a statements saying, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The U.S. attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.”

The president of MIT, Rafael Reif, said on Saturday that the university would initiate an internal investigation into its role in the prosecution of Swartz. “I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” Reif said in the statement issued Sunday. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.” Hal Abelson, an electrical engineering professor at MIT was asked by Reif to “lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.”

Anonymous, the Internet hacking collective, on Sunday night hit many of MIT’s sites with a “Denial of Service” attack and also hacked two of MIT’s sites, turning them into memorials that called for reforms to computer crime laws as well as copyright and intellectual property laws.

Two years prior to the MIT incident, Swartz downloaded and released a trove of U.S. Federal Court documents from the PACER system. Like JSTOR, the documents at PACER cost the viewer to read the documents. In that incident, Swartz downloaded 18 million pages.

Funeral services for Swartz will be held on Tuesday.