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Well that was an effed up way to start the day


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Somehow, I am missing the humor in someone jumping to their death..... <_<

Frankly, Berigan, I am incapable of caring about someone who doesn't care about themselves enough to stay alive.

I am especially incapable of caring about someone who is narcissistic enough to kill themselves so publicly. I didn't need to see that shit, nor did the firefighters who scrapped him off the sidewalk. Take some fucking pills if you're going to do that.

And here everyone thought *I* was the bleeding heart type...

You never, ever can know what is truly going on in someone's head. I had a good friend end her life like this a few years back. And yet, her last emails to me were the most positive she had ever written. I later found out that when she moved back to France, the doctors there thought the American doctors were over-medicating her, and cut her anti-depressants way back. Her sister said she was having strange visions before she died.

Have no knowledge as to what was going on in this woman's mind, but whether her death was to be public or not might not have been a thought she was capable of at the time. I imagine her parents and friends are going through hell right now.....6th NYU student to kill themselves this year! :(

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-...p-regional-wire

Edited by BERIGAN
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About an hour ago I was walking on Mercer between Washington Place and Waverly towards Oren's Daily Roast (damn good coffee shop), when I hear a sreaming voice above my head. I look up, see a naked person falling through the air, and stop dead in my tracks as it lands head first, bounces off the pavement with a sickly thud and come to rest with its ass facing me. He (or she, I didn't step around to find out) landed about five to ten feet in front of me. I came back to my dept. to tell my coworkers what happened. They asked if the person was dead. I said if the fall hadn't killed him, I would have.

I notified the police immediately, of course. To my surprise, they had almost no questions whatsoever. The body was collected within five minutes.

I'm just kind of surprised you didn't call the cops or something. Or is this common place in NY?

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NY Times

September 7, 2004

N.Y.U. Student Is Killed in Fall at Tisch School

By GLENN COLLINS

A 23-year-old graduate film student at New York University fell to her death yesterday from the roof of the Tisch School of the Arts in what school officials said was apparently a suicide. It was the seventh high-profile death of an N.Y.U. student in a year, and the second death of a Tisch student in less than a week.

Yesterday, the holiday before fall classes were to begin, the second-year film student, Joanne M. Leavy, was found in the street outside the rear entrance of the Tisch School at 286 Mercer Street, the police said. The school building from which she fell is across from 11 Waverly Place, where, they said, she shared an apartment with her father, Lee.

The police were still investigating the cause of death, though an N.Y.U. spokesman called the death an "apparent suicide." Including yesterday's death, six N.Y.U. students have died in falls from heights since last September. Five of those cases were determined to be suicides.

Early last Wednesday, a 19-year-old sophomore at Tisch, Spenser Kimbrough, reported feeling ill in the university residence hall at 80 Lafayette Street. After calling 911, he was taken to New York University Downtown Hospital, near City Hall, where he died at 3 a.m., police said. The medical examiner is investigating the cause of death.

"These two deaths are unrelated, other than that both were students in the Tisch School of the Arts," said John Beckman, the N.Y.U. spokesman. "Each involved very different circumstances, but for the N.Y.U. community, and the Tisch School in particular, these two deaths, coming so close together, compound the sense of sorrow we feel and strengthens our resolve to do all we can to insure the well-being of all our students."

Yesterday, students clustered about the campus at the school of 40,000 and tried to make sense of Ms. Leavy's death, at the end of the freshman orientation the university calls Welcome Week. Students were mystified that the death occurred at the beginning of the semester, well before the cold, dark days of winter and the pressure of school assignments.

"The fact that there have been so many suicides is bizarre," said Jason Schneider, 20, an acting student who had just transferred from a small school in rural Missouri. "What's so surprising is that class hasn't even started yet, and we've already lost two people."

According to witnesses, Ms. Leavy left her apartment hastily a few minutes before her death about 10:30 a.m. Edward Dhanpat, a doorman in the building for 22 years, said that Ms. Leavy had left the building running, "and she was wearing no shoes," and added that her skirt and shirt appeared to have been put on hastily. Mr. Dhanpat said he thought she had muttered something like, "Don't tell my father," as she passed.

Mr. Dhanpat described her as a pretty woman about 5 feet, 8 inches tall with dark reddish hair. He said she had been very serious "and never said hello." She lived in the building for 8 or 10 years, he recalled, and he also remembered that she had sometimes come into the lobby with cameras and film equipment.

Mr. Dhanpat said she headed from the building at the northwest corner of Mercer and Waverly Streets and went east toward the Tisch building. There, she is believed to have turned right onto Broadway, and entered through the polished granite pillars flanking the bronze letters that announce the school's name at 721 Broadway.

Ms. Leavy's body was found in the street, next to the patch of sidewalk across from the Tisch school's rear entrance, where plastic garbage bags from the building had been piled on the sidewalk. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Her distraught father was interviewed by the police at the scene, but asked for privacy when questioned by reporters on the street.

Mr. Beckman, of N.Y.U., said, "These deaths are a great matter of concern to the university administration." He said the school had expanded counseling hours for students and had established a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week hot line to connect students to counseling or health services.

"There's an understandable desire to deduce a single cause or conclude that there is a single phenomenon at work," Mr. Beckman added, "but we are not in a position to say that. Each of these deaths has its own history and motivation and circumstances."

The parents of Mr. Kimbrough, the student who died last week, have called for an investigation of his death. In a statement, Mr. Beckman said that "any suggestion that the university has been less than forthcoming is wrong and unfair," adding that the school had cooperated with the police and had made counseling available to Tisch students who were concerned about Mr. Kimbrough's death.

Colin Moynihan and Patrick Healy contributed reporting for this article.

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About an hour ago I was walking on Mercer between Washington Place and Waverly towards Oren's Daily Roast (damn good coffee shop), when I hear a sreaming voice above my head. I look up, see a naked person falling through the air, and stop dead in my tracks as it lands head first, bounces off the pavement with a sickly thud and come to rest with its ass facing me. He (or she, I didn't step around to find out) landed about five to ten feet in front of me. I came back to my dept. to tell my coworkers what happened. They asked if the person was dead. I said if the fall hadn't killed him, I would have.

I notified the police immediately, of course. To my surprise, they had almost no questions whatsoever. The body was collected within five minutes.

I'm just kind of surprised you didn't call the cops or something. Or is this common place in NY?

Read what you quoted...

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Somehow, I am missing the humor in someone jumping to their death..... <_<

Frankly, Berigan, I am incapable of caring about someone who doesn't care about themselves enough to stay alive.

I am especially incapable of caring about someone who is narcissistic enough to kill themselves so publicly. I didn't need to see that shit, nor did the firefighters who scrapped him off the sidewalk. Take some fucking pills if you're going to do that.

And here everyone thought *I* was the bleeding heart type...

You never, ever can know what is truly going on in someone's head. I had a good friend end her life like this a few years back. And yet, her last emails to me were the most positive she had ever written. I later found out that when she moved back to France, the doctors there thought the American doctors were over-medicating her, and cut her anti-depressants way back. Her sister said she was having strange visions before she died.

Have no knowledge as to what was going on in this woman's mind, but whether her death was to be public or not might not have been a thought she was capable of at the time. I imagine her parents and friends are going through hell right now.....6th NYU student to kill themselves this year! :(

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-...p-regional-wire

This is a fair point. Suffice to say that I get a little pissed off whenever someone nearly kills me. I also have my own attitudes based on my personal experiences with suicide, etc.

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Jesus.

Have to say that I think its important to laugh at stuff like this. Also I think its important to have sympathy for people even when they are so tragically selfish as to kill themselves.

Tragic selfishness might well head the list of things that are human.

It's alright to joke, but don't tell yourself that this is somehow less horrible because they person who killed herself had a flaw you find dispicable.

Much wisdom in the "there but for the grace of God" attitude.

--eric

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I'm glad J is okay also. As fucked up as J's day was, the person who killed herself was apparently having a much worse day. I'm a little taken back at the lack of concern for someone who died in such a terrible way. My guess is that she didn't intend to take anyone with her. I certainly wouldn't want to be held to my first comments if this had occurred in front of me since I'm sure I would be in shock. But I would hope that at some point, I could dredge up some compassion for someone who took their life and not think such an awful event was just all about me.

I still don't find anything funny about suicide. We all have our experiences with it, I suspect, and I didn't find humor in the deaths of people I knew and I don't find any humor in this one either even though I didn't know her. It's America, free country. It's quite okay to make fun of tragedy but don't get your panties in a bunch if someday you are the butt of a joke after tragedy strikes you.

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My thing is that the way you understand the truly terrible is to tell (or hear) a good joke about it.

I think there's something to the Henri Bergson line (laughter is cruelty), but I think it goes well beyond that.

Frankly, I don't think forced/enforced solemnity does much to meet the occasion, either.

--eric

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I've got very mixed feelings about this. Relief, of course, than J wasn't hurt, but there's a side of me that finds the specifics of the situation almost amusing - that J just avoided himself being killed in such a ridiculous way.

Then I'm reminded that my cousin - 19 or 20 at the time - killed himself in much the same way just this past june. Yeah, it's easy to laugh when it's a mere news story; harder when it hits so close to home...

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It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

-- Woody Allen, Without Feathers

It's called dark humor.

Woody Allen was making fun of himself, not some stranger who landed on the pavement in front of him.

RDK nailed it. It's always funnier when you have no investment in the dead person. If you can find humor in the suicide of a loved one, god bless you. I hope I never "evolve" to a point where I can do that. And don't confuse my comments with roasting a dead loved one at a memorial. I'm talking about blaming the dead person for their shortcomings, making fun of the act itself, it's tacky and tasteless. I call this culture gap. We live in a culture where everything is material for a joke. Respect and honor are considered old fashioned and stuffy. I'm okay with being old fashioned and stuffy.

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A friend of mine living in Thailand sent me an email a couple of weeks ago telling a similar story. My buddy was having a beer and a guy jumped from an eight story building, landing right in front of him.

Glad you're okay, J.

Crap, I forgot!

An Iranian fellow jumped to his death from the fifth floor of my apartment building in Bangkok when I was there. I didn't see it, but I saw some of the blood afterwards when I could bear to look in that direction.

Left a family behind too.

Funny how I had pushed that from my memory...

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I didn't save it but the Chicago Tribune Magazine had a long piece on pedestrians getting hit by Metra trains. A fair number of these are suicides. where the person absolutely does not want a chance at backing out. There usually isn't that much damage to the train, but there is quite a psychic toll on the engineer who cannot possibly stop the train in time. So a somewhat selfish way to go.

I am always sorry to hear about suicides and just a bit baffled. I find it particularly sad when it is a young person, who just doesn't have the perspective to realize that most bad things do pass. There is a lot about this world and even in my life I don't care for, but I wouldn't willingly cash it in. I'm certainly in no hurry to find out if there is anything afterwards (especially as I am 95% convinced there isn't anything). I suppose the exception would be if I was in terrible chronic pain with no relief in sight.

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I didn't save it but the Chicago Tribune Magazine had a long piece on pedestrians getting hit by Metra trains.  A fair number of these are suicides. where the person absolutely does not want a chance at backing out.  There usually isn't that much damage to the train, but there is quite a psychic toll on the engineer who cannot possibly stop the train in time.  So a somewhat selfish way to go. 

I am always sorry to hear about suicides and just a bit baffled.  I find it particularly sad when it is a young person, who just doesn't have the perspective to realize that most bad things do pass.  There is a lot about this world and even in my life I don't care for, but I wouldn't willingly cash it in.  I'm certainly in no hurry to find out if there is anything afterwards (especially as I am 95% convinced there isn't anything).  I suppose the exception would be if I was in terrible chronic pain with no relief in sight.

Used to happen all the time on NJ Transit. I just started taking the train into NYC again, but over the years it wasn't unusual to take a late train and be delayed while they cleaned things up.

edited fer spelling

Edited by 7/4
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Sadly, JJ Johnson took his own life (he shot himself). From what I understand he was in extreme pain and with no recovery potential he finally decided "enough". While I can understand why someone might do that, there's still a shock and a mess for someone to deal with. I would hate to do that to a loved one.

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