A 21-year-old man killed himself Monday by jumping from the top of a New York City structure known as the Vessel, the third suicide at Manhattan’s newest landmark.
UPDATE:
The latest suicide was a man who was wanted in San Antonio, Texas, for killing his mother, it was reported on Tuesday. Other than his name, Franklin Washington, no further details were released.
The sordid nature of this death doesn’t change the tragedy of the first two suicides from the structure.
On December 22, a Brooklyn woman jumped to her death from the West 33rd Street tourist attraction after writing a note to be posted on social media the day after her suicide.
“If you’re reading this, I’m gone,” Yocheved Gourarie, 24, wrote in the post. “I hope you can find some comfort in knowing I am no longer in pain.”
Yocheved had suffered from anorexia and depression since she was 12 years old.
The first suicide from the Hudson Yards structure was a 19-year-old former high-school rugby star who jumped last February.
Peter DeSalvo, a Sacred Heart University freshman from Basking Ridge, NJ, was described by his coach as a “tough kid, not afraid of anything” and the most unlikely person to commit suicide.
The teen was by himself when he climbed on a railing and jumped from the sixth floor of the structure.
He left no note and his family said they had no idea why he killed himself.
The $200-million honeycomb-like tourist attraction opened in March 2019. It rises 16 stories and has 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to view the city. Disabled people objected to it for not being wheelchair-accessible.
Critics have described it as a monstrosity and an eyesore. Now, many are calling it a destination for death.
I’m so sad about the death of these persons…
Why do such things happen?
Emotional suffering is the worst affliction, life becomes unbearable, even for a tough rugby star.
Indeed!
Damn
Yeah. Developers call the ugly structure New York City’s Eiffel Tower — I call it a one-way ticket to oblivion for the emotionally afflicted. The site is closed for now, after the third suicide, but it will reopen and someone else will jump to their death. And then more etc. They should at least put up some fucking guardrails that cannot be scaled.
Why do you think this is happening? you seem to have some kind of vibe with it and I respect that.
After a night of drinking I still don’t know the answer, mtaggart. Generally, I think that Covid, which kills 11,000 people in the world every day (ourworldindata.org) — that’s nearly four 9/11 attacks every day! — has made death more of a reality than it ever was, especially among young people. There is a heightened sense of fatalism in the world — a world more of ‘doom and gloom’ than hope.
If I was a religious man I’d say the devil is upon us and God is gone missing, but since I’m not religious I think that overall feeling of hopelessness has stirred up our own personal demons. In the case of the young woman who jumped from that monstrosity of a tourist attraction it was her struggle with anorexia and depression. In these days of covid, personal demons are now everywhere — young people with their whole lives ahead of them commit suicide rather than face the isolation and the loneliness, front line nurses who contract the disease take their own lives for fear of infecting others. The pain-free peace of death becomes preferable to the hell and fear of life.