They gave an employee a procedure that deleted their database. The only mistake the employee made was following the procedure and not using his own credentials, instead using the credentials in the procedure. That was a standard human error, no big deal. Humans make mistakes, it's all of our's jobs to reduce the probability of this, with good quality procedures, questioning attitudes etc.
To provide an employee with a procedure that contains credentials to the production database is ridiculous, this was going to happen at some point with a procedure as poor as that. To then blame that employee immediately and fire him is knee jerk and immature. To be fair, the guy is probably better off not working for that company anyway.
Not having backups etc, well, that's the companies fault. All the employee has done is to uncover a poor working culture within that company, and expose a bad CTO. This is not the failing of the employee, it's clearly a failing of the company. They deserve what they got.
The person fired can make many positives from this. This is an excellent case study about business culture, procedures, strong catastrophe planning and testing, threat and error management, how to treat fellow humans. Your experience in this can be valuable to other companies, and the good ones will recognise this. Use this to your advantage, let that company fail, it was going to happen at some point, you were simply unlucky...
To give a personal experience, I work in a nuclear power station, in the control room. One shift I made a mistake, I rushed a job. I followed my procedure to the letter, I didn't make any mistakes, but because I chose to complete a certain activity early before an additional check was performed I broke our operating rules (the law effectively). I owned up to it as soon as I was conscious of it, and the investigation started. My authorisation was pulled and I went for drugs testing etc.
The first thing that occurred once management found out was that I received a phone call. It was the Operations Manager calling for me, and he called me to thank me for raising this report and owning up to it. He understood that without this honest reporting, the problem couldn't get fixed, and would happen again in the future. It has probably already occurred in the past too. My authorisation was recovered that same shift, and I carried on. There was no detriment to my career (quite the opposite infact) and life goes on, but now with better procedures...