NYU Shaken by Suicide Jumpers at Bobst Library

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2003/aloct03/nyushakensuicide.cfm

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Posted October 20, 2003.

NYU Shaken by Suicide Jumpers at Bobst Library

Extra security guards have been posted at New York University’s 12-story Elmer Holmes Bobst Library while construction workers installed glass walls to enclose the library’s interior balconies where two students recently leaped to their deaths in separate cases of apparent suicide.

Stephen Bohler, an 18-year-old freshman from Dayton, Ohio, reportedly threw himself onto the library atrium’s marble floor October 10 after climbing over an upper-story ledge. John D. Skolnik, a 20-year-old junior from Evanston, Illinois, died September 12 as students watched him fall from the 10th-floor balcony.

Calling the deaths “devastating” and “unfathomable,” NYU President John Sexton said in an October 13 memo that “aggressive measures must be taken to protect us against such traumas,” according to the October 14 New York Daily News. “We need to reassert for the library the central role it fulfills in this community of scholars.”

University spokesman John Beckman said in the October 11 New York Times that the school was providing counselors at the library and was preparing to take “a number of steps” to address issues around the deaths. An NYU spokesperson said these were apparently the first suicides in the 30-year-old library.

Posted October 20, 2003.