I would say that it's difficult to mock his idiot friends separately. Like, you can mean to do just that and you can even can explicitly say you're doing this (mocking only the living), but I doubt any casual bystander is going to see the distinction.
Anyway, regardless, Friday is right but the problem is that situations like this are basically a perfect set up for the kind of "HA HA HA BUDDY!" response.
None of us will ever know any more about this man than this story of his death. Not only that, but that death happened in a way that much of the population sees as "just" (in the sense that "he got what was coming to him"), so a lot of people's first instinct is to chuck out their normal mental checks against a blatant display of schadenfraude.
Maybe if one of us knew him and give us a picture of a person instead of a humourous byline, then it would be a post for the shit days thread instead. But we didn't so we got a spectrum of reactions, just like any community would.