John McAfee‘s widow, Janice, stated in a press conference that her husband was not suicidal.
McAfee, the creator of the antivirus software by the same name, was found dead in his Spanish prison cell from a suspected suicide. He was arrested in October 2020 at Barcelona’s international airport after Tennessee officials issued a warrant on charges of tax evasion. Prosecutors were pursuing a maximum of 30 years in prison for $4 million in evaded taxes. McAfee was being held until the court decided on extradition.
McAfee’s death occurred hours after Spain’s National Court made the preliminary decision to extradite him to the U.S. While the autopsy results are not complete, officials said that the scene indicated a suicide. The family revealed that they are asking for their own autopsy and investigation in a statement.
Janice said that she believed her husband was not suicidal and that he would not end his life. She told reporters, “His last words to me were ‘I love you and I will call you in the evening.’ Those words are not words of somebody who is suicidal.”
Janice added that her husband had already anticipated the court ruling against him. “We had a plan of action already in place to appeal that decision,” she said. “I blame the U.S. authorities for this tragedy: Because of these politically motivated charges against him my husband is now dead.”
McAfee tried to argue before the Spanish National Court that his warrant was politically motivated, but the judge told him that there was no evidence of such a claim. The judge’s ruling said, “On the contrary, according to his own testimony, he took part in primaries of a certain party to defend his convictions with a result little favorable to him.”
During the press conference, Janice defended McAfee, saying, “All John wanted to do was spend his remaining years fishing and drinking. He had hope that things would work out. We knew that there would be an uphill battle to continue to fight this situation. But he’s a fighter … And anybody that knows John, that knows him even a little bit, knows that about him.”
According to authorities, the results of the autopsy could take “days or weeks.”
