Results tagged “suicide”

Yesterday afternoon, a 13-year-old jumped to his death from his family's apartment terrace at the Tracey Towers on Mosholu Parkway. The Daily News reports that Juda Agyemang "was sent home from school for not paying attention" (according to family members) while the Post says he had been "pulled from his school's basketball team because of poor grades."

Last Friday, a man jumped off the George Washington Bridge—and survived and managed to swim to the NJ side, where he was taken to a hospital. According to the NY Post, "Adrian Rawn, 28, took the plunge without so much as a pause after abruptly stopping his car on the span's lower level at about 11:30 a.m." And that would be a 212-foot plunge into 55-degree water.

Allegedly the NYPD was investigating Andrew Williamson-Noble's death at NYU's Bobst Library early yesterday morning as a possible homicide, until they discovered a suicide note in his dorm room. While his final words should remain private, the Daily News has apparently done some digging into his personal life.

New information has already come out about the NYU student who committed suicide early this morning at Bobst Library. The man was 20-year-old Andrew Williamson-Noble of Irvington, New York. The Daily News reports that he used an NYU-issued card to gain access to the library, and jumped from the 10th floor.

Early this morning we received an email from an NYU student who was studying at Bobst Library. He told us that around 4:30 a.m. he heard a "huge boom" that ended up being a successful suicide attempt. He told us the "kid must have jumped from high judging from where he landed in the lobby. Couldn't tell his condition from what I saw. I was told by a cop on the scene that he didn't look good."

Hey, whaddaya know—shooting 5,000 volts of electricity at somebody's chest could adversely affect the heart! Manufacturer Taser International Inc. has issued a warning about Taser chest-shots, suggesting that law enforcement officers aim their Tasers at perpetrators' backs, arms, or abdomens. In response to the warning, the NYPD brass has formally ordered officers not to shoot Tasers at suspects' chests.

The widow of NYPD Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who killed himself a week after issuing a fatal command to Taser a mentally disturbed man, is suing the city. Her lawyers are arguing that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and NYPD spokesman Paul Browne contributed to his suicide by making him a scapegoat for the Sept. 24, 2008 incident, in which a naked bipolar man fell one story to his death after being Tasered. Court papers obtained by the Post argue that public comments made by the NYPD's top brass "caused Michael Pigott to become humiliated, distraught, depressed, and caused him to commit suicide."

Two families are reacting to the apparent suicide of the man suspected of fatally stabbing another person in Midtown. Army veteran Sir'mone McCaulla, found dead in a Philadelphia apartment yesterday, left a suicide note trying to explain his tragic altercation with Christopher Gutierrez.

The man suspected of fatally stabbing a man outside the midtown's James Farley Post Office on Sunday afternoon was apparently found dead at his girlfriend's apartment yesterday. The police had identified the suspect as Sir'mone McCaulla, 28, yesterday morning and police think his body was found in a Philadelphia apartment hours later.

Police are searching for the body of Annie Morrell Petrillo, who jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge on Thursday evening. Petrillo's mother, Anne Scripps Douglas, an heir to the Scripps newspaper fortune, was found bludgeoned on December 31, 1993 and later died from her injuries; the main suspect was Petrillo's stepfather, who killed himself by committing suicide off the Tappan Zee Bridge on New Year's Day 1994.

The Staten Island Advance reports, "A chilling murder-suicide yesterday, capped with a bomb scare, ended a deadly 24 hours on Staten Island that included two more public suicides, each in a borough park, and a fatal motorcycle crash." In the case of the murder suicide, a man called 911 saying, "I shot my wife. Yeah, it was an accident, and I shot the cats too." John Pizon said he would leave his door open for EMT, but when cops arrived to the home in Bulls Head, they found Pizon dead from a gunshot wound to the head; police also found grenade and other firearms in the home (Pizon apparently collected Civil War firearms). On Tuesday night, a retired police officer was found dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, in Great Kills Park and yesterday morning, a 22-year-old man's body was found hanging from a tree in Willowbrook Park. The man who discovered the body in Willowbrook Park was walking his dog, "I saw the waste basket turned up and him, hanging there... I felt sad and scared."

Last night an unidentified man survived a suicide plunge from the Brooklyn Bridge after threatening police officers who were trying to talk him down. The 38-year-old man was approached by cops around 10:30 p.m as he clung to a girder about 35 feet away from the tower on the Brooklyn side. After waving a knife at them, he plunged to the East River, at least 120 feet below. Rescuers pulled him from the waters and rushed him to Lutheran Hospital, where his condition is not known. But police sources tell the Post investigators are checking the van with Jersey plates he abandoned at the scene to see if he left a note. And it's not unheard of for jumpers to survive suicide attempts on the East River bridges; in January a man jumped from the Manhattan Bridge, drifted to the Brooklyn shore, and walked away (photos).

The seventeen-year-old who caught a Queens Center Mall jumper earlier in the week is all checked out after being readmitted to a hospital yesterday to have doctors look at his open head wounds and vomiting that was still occurring following Wednesday's incident. But his mother says that Derrick Osario may have some remaining effects spiritually after the accident. Rosarito Osario tells Newsday, "My son was reborn on April 8 again. With this situation, he was born again that day. That could have been him that died." She told the paper that her son has a long Y-shaped cut crossing his head following the collision. When asked about the woman who landed on her son while committing suicide, she said, "We are praying for [the woman], the decision she made to cut her own life, her family." The father of the boy did not speak publicly at the advice of a lawyer that the family has hired.

Derrik Munoz, who suffered a head injury when a suicidal woman fell on him earlier this week, has returned to the hospital, according to NY1. Munoz had been sitting in a massage chair at the Queens Center mall when a woman jumped over the third-floor railing; he needed 23 staples to close his wounds. Munoz spoke to NY1 yesterday from his home: He didn't remember a thing, gave condolences to the woman's family and even expected to be in school on Monday. Now the station says he "is being examined by doctors after his head wounds reopened and he began vomiting."

A medical examiner on Staten Island has ruled that the death of the student body president at Port Richmond High School was a suicide. The Staten Island Advance reports that 18-year-old Jin Ju Kim died on Monday after an overdose led to "complications from acetaminophen toxicity." Students and staff were informed of the senior's death just before the school went on Spring Break this week. On a memorial page set up for Kim, Port Richmond Principal Timothy Gannon said, "Jin Ju was a breath of fresh air. She gave our school a smile each and every day and always made us feel so special. Every time I met with Jin Ju, she gave me a big smile that reminded me how special all of our students are."

After catching the fall of a woman who leaped to her death inside the Queens Center Mall, a teenager has been released from the hospital without any memory of yesterday's accident. Derrick Munoz, a sophomore at Amityville High School, was sitting in a massage chair with his girlfriend on the ground level of the mall when 55-year-old Mary Lovelace landed on him after jumping from the third-floor balcony. He had suffered some non-life-threatening head trauma; his girlfriend told the News, "We were talking and all of a sudden I feel something heavy on me. I get up and I see a lady on the floor." Newsday says that before the jump, Lovelace "appeared to argue with other people, believed to be her relatives, before taking off her shoes and jacket and dropping her purse. She then dangled from a balcony railing and let go." The DA's office says that her two children witnessed the incident.

A 56-year-old woman leapt three stories to her death at the Queens Center Mall this afternoon. Her fall was broken by a 17-year-old boy who was injured, one of many teenagers milling about on the concourse level after school. The woman was in the company of two other teenagers before she jumped. She was pronounced dead at the scene; the teenager she landed on suffered serious head trauma, but is in stable condition at Elmhurst Medical Center. WPIX is saying that the teenage victim was walking on the ground level; NY1 says that he was sitting in a massage chair when the woman fell around 2:30. A witness told the Times, “First I thought it was a gunshot, and I said ‘I’m out of here.’ People started screaming. There was pandemonium and chaos. And I looked below to the lower level and people were screaming that someone had jumped from above.” Police cordoned off sections of the mall and shut down certain escalators leading to the lower level.

Fifteen years ago today, Kurt Cobain died at the age of 27—he was found three days later inside of his home in Seattle. That day many fans of the band came home from school or work to see this MTV Kurt Loder broadcast (which we don't remember him delivering quite so detached). Soon after, Loder talked to Courtney Love—that year, 1994, she lost both her husband and her friend/bandmate Kristen Pfaff. Today fans are gathered, as they are every year, at the unofficial memorial of the singer: a bench in Viretta Park in Seattle (Cobain has no gravesite).

Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa told a Cedar Rapids radio station how he really feels about the AIG executives taking bonuses after needing to be bailed out with $170 billion in federal money: "I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed. But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide. And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology." His spokesman later said Grassley was speaking rhetorically.

The Facebook page that Paul Zolezzi used to leave a suicide note via status update before hanging himself at Mount Prospect Park yesterday has been taken down. Zolezzi, who struggled with heroin addiction, had been leaving several cryptic statuses recently during his move back to New York, following an unhappy stay in Portland, OR. One read, "Paul is going to be the first person ever to hang himself on the way out of Portland! Everything here sucks!" After his final update the night before his death, a friend replied, "Are you dying? or just staying brooklyn? I hope it's the latter." Zolezzi's father committed suicide when he was 8-years-old by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. A friend told the Post, "He didn't have the best start, and he really wanted more than anything to overcome all of that and to not be buried by issues of his childhood. But no matter how hard he tried to escape that, he suffered."

The Daily News reports that a 30-year-old man committed suicide—"A jogger discovered the body of Paul Zolezzi, 30, about 7 a.m., police said"— (apparently near the Brooklyn Museum in Mount Prospect Park, not Prospect Park) and left a suicide note on his Facebook status. His message read, left last night, reads, "Was born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn......And couldn't have asked for more." His mother told the News that her son, an aspiring model and actor with a heroin addiction, was depressed after a broken engagement. She also blamed the drugs, "I would say that people get so lonely, so delusional that all they want to do is be remembered... He probably wanted to be remembered in a big way, to do it dramatically - that's what drugs will do to people."

There are some new details coming to light following yesterday's incident at the Dalton School, where a 17-year-old allegedly jumped to his death. While the Post is withholding the student's name, the Daily News reports that Theodore (Teddy) Graubard went to the empty 11th floor dance studio and "when asked by a teacher why he was there...said he wanted to look around." Minutes later he jumped, something the school's 4th graders witnessed as they were enjoying recess out on the sidewalk (the paper notes that he "nearly landed" on some of them). A security guard said he "heard a loud bang. It sounded like a gunshot. The fourth-graders were out here [and] everybody started running away from the body."

We're hearing that a person jumped from the upper floors at the Empire State Building and that his/her body was found on the 25th floor landing. The last suicide at the building was in 2007, when an employee jumped out of a 69th floor window. Update: According to the Post, "A middle-aged woman plunged to her death today after she apparently jumped out a 39th-floor window of the Empire State Building." She worked at North Bay Apparel, offices; cops say she did not leave a suicide note.

UPDATED: The NYPD confirmed that Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, founder and head of hedge fund Access International Advisors which invested heavily with Bernard Madoff, was found dead in his Madison Avenue office. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told Bloomberg News, “Our investigative premise is that it was a suicide."

Last week, descendants of Macy's founder Isidor Straus sued Jay Leno and a NYC parking garage owner, claiming they had swindled the late John Straus out of his antique cars. Now, the Post reports that Dennis Ricca, co-owner of the Windsor Garage on East 76th Street, shot himself in the head last week--and a mourner blamed the lawsuit. The Straus family insisted that Ricca's garage took advantage of the ailing Straus, but a lawyer for Leno, Ricca and others blamed Straus for non-payment his account and said auctioning the valuable cars off was their right. Still, the Strauses claim it was a "sham auction" since Leno was able to buy a 1931 Dusenberg worth $1.2 million for $180,000 and Ricca bought a Rolls Royce Phantom worth $500,000 for $0. Ricca and Leno's lawyer said, "We hope the press will respect his family and let them grieve in peace."

Yesterday, the funeral for NYPD Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who killed himself a week after issuing a command that led to a man's death by Taser, was held in Islip, Long Island. Hundreds of police officers were on hand to remember the 21-year veteran of the force, who left behind his wife and three children. Rev. Douglas Madlon revealed during the service that Pigott, stripped of his badge and gun, was afraid he wouldn't be a police officer and had said to him, "I'm not a desk person." One fellow cop told Newsday, "It's a horrible, horrible thing. He was a great man. He was a cop's cop." And while there was bitterness from some police officers and even Pigott's own father towards the NYPD, Police Commission Ray Kelly attended the wake over the weekend but not the funeral "out of sensitivity to the family."

Hundreds of officers from the NYPD and elsewhere came out to pay their respects to Lieutenant Michael Pigott yesterday at the first day of his wake in Islip. Pigott died Thursday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, a week after being embroiled in a media frenzy following the Taser-induced death of an emotionally disturbed man. Friends and family paid tribute to Pigott yesterday with one lifelong friend telling Newsday, "He was a gentle-hearted person, big heart, generous, friendly, sweet. Everyone loved him." There were also definite feelings of bitterness in the air due to the circumstances surrounding Pigott's death. Some colleagues were upset at Commissioner Ray Kelly's denial of an antique truck from Piggott's unit to be used during his funeral. And one guest lashed out at reporters saying, “You people are half of what caused this, O.K.? The media and the pressure you put on this man that did nothing wrong, you are responsible.”

The wake for NYPD Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who killed himself on Thursday, is being held in Islip, Long Island today and tomorrow, with funeral service on Monday. Pigott shot himself in the head at Emergency Service Unit headquarters, apparently racked with guilt and worry after his command led to the fatal Tasering of emotionally disturbed man, Iman Morales, in Brooklyn on September 24.

NYPD Emergency Services Unit Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who killed himself yesterday morning, left behind a suicide note noting his remorse and concern over his family. A police source told the Post, "He didn't want his family to see him cuffed up and jailed. The guy felt he disgraced his family."

Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who ordered the fatal Tasering of an emotionally disturbed person, killed himself this morning. WABC 7 reports "Pigott reported to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, where he took his life shortly after 6 a.m." and another officer "sustained a non-life threatening injury during the incident." Pigott had been stripped of his gun and badge after the Tasering, where Iman Morales fell to his death, and yesterday, the 21-year police force veteran had said he was "truly sorry for what happened." The Daily News suggests that Pigott, who turned 46 today, went to Floyd Bennett Field--where the Emergency Services Unit in headquartered--because there are weapons there.