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Seeing as how I'm the only NYU student left here... thought I share this with you guys. I don't know how far it has spread. There have been three suicides in the past two months and it took awhile for us to even hear about it. What is there to say... drugs and heights are a bad combination. If you ever feel that bad, eat lots of chocolate and go punch a wall. Curse some random strangers. Anything.

www.nytimes.com/2003/10/20/nyregion/20FALL.html

If you can't access that (I needed to login), here's the full story:


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October 20, 2003
N.Y.U. Student's Fatal Plunge Appears to Be Another Suicide
By PATRICK HEALY

19-year-old New York University student who plunged to her death from a sixth-floor window Saturday night appeared to have committed suicide, the police said yesterday.

The student was identified yesterday by the police as Michelle Gluckman of Brooklyn.

There has been no official ruling on the manner of Ms. Gluckman's death, but investigators said it appeared to be a suicide. If so, her death would be the third reported suicide of an N.Y.U. student this semester.

Two other students leapt to their deaths from the balconies of the university's library, one in September and the other earlier this month.

Ms. Gluckman died after she fell from the kitchen window of a friend's sixth-floor apartment at 1 University Place, a 22-story building between Fifth Avenue and Broadway just north of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. She landed in the second-story courtyard below.

Ms. Gluckman, a sophomore who lived in the university's Third Avenue North dormitory, and some of her friends had gathered at the University Place apartment, the police said.

It remained a mystery how a gathering of friends ended in Ms. Gluckman's death. Investigators were considering the possibility that marijuana was somehow involved, officials said.

Around 10 p.m. Saturday, many residents of 1 University Place were reading, watching the first game of the World Series or getting ready for bed when screams began to ricochet around the open-air courtyard.

At first, some said, they thought the commotion came from Yankee fans or from N.Y.U. students who live in a freshman dormitory next door. But the screams intensified, and some residents who peered out their windows said they saw a shadowy figure perched near the windowsill of apartment 6-O.

"It was chilling screams," said Joy Brosnan, whose apartment faces the courtyard. Ms. Brosnan said she heard loud bumping, a female's voice scream "No!," a yell for help, and a plea that someone call emergency medical services.

A fifth-floor resident, who would not give his name, said that when he peered out his window, he saw someone hanging head-down from the sixth-floor apartment window and two arms wrapped around the person. Seconds later, residents heard a loud thud.

Ms. Gluckman was taken to St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, where she was declared dead.

Family members declined to discuss Ms. Gluckman, and residents of the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood where the family lives would not speak to reporters.

The apartment building where Ms. Gluckman fell is not owned by or associated with N.Y.U., though a number of university students live there, and the school's dorms border the apartment building, residents said. One of them, Aya Takada, said there can be friction between older residents and students.

On the N.Y.U. campus yesterday, students said the details of Ms. Gluckman's death had an all-too-familiar ring. The earlier suicides involved an 18-year-old freshman from Irvine, Calif., and a 20-year-old from Evanston, Ill., who jumped to their deaths from walkways of the school's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library to the atrium's marble floors.

"What is going on?" asked Navindra Singh, 29, a third-year medical student, as he stood outside the school's library yesterday afternoon. "Left and right, people are jumping."

After the second suicide, students said they began to notice security guards stationed around the library's interior balconies. John Beckman, a university spokesman, said N.Y.U. was installing glass barriers around the balconies.

Mr. Beckman cautioned against lumping the deaths together.

"These are individual acts, and each will have their own motivations and their own circumstances," he said. "There's a desire for a single rational explanation to derive some single meaning from these deaths, but that may be impossible."