My recollection is that some people in the community knew his identity. His sudden disappearance invited a lot of people to dig into it, many of which were not even Ruby people to begin with. There was even a newspaper article written about him years after. I would not attribute all that digging to the Ruby community. If anything I remember people being very respectful at the time.

Perhaps OP meant that _why was a victim of toxicity, rather than a purveyor of it?

_why isn't publicly active since his disappearance.