Tag: national
Woman killed when 12-year-old boy jumps off highway overpass
A 12-year-old boy who police said jumped off a highway overpass in an attempted suicide took the life of a young woman instead.
Marisa Harris, 22, was headed eastbound on Interstate 66 near the Cedar Lane overpass at around 4:15 p.m. when the boy came crashing down onto her 2005 Ford Explorer, Virginia State Police said in a statement. Harris was killed but her 23-year-old passenger and the 12-year-old boy both survived. The incident is being investigated as an attempted suicide, according to police.
“Based on the investigation and witness accounts, a 12-year-old male jumped from the Cedar Lane overpass,” Virginia State Police said in a statement. “The impact incapacitated the vehicle’s driver.”
Police said the car’s passenger then “steered the vehicle off the interstate … [and] came to a stop on the left shoulder against the jersey wall.”
The 12-year-old boy, who hasn’t been identified, was rushed to Fairfax Inova Hospital to be treated for “life-threatening injuries,” according to police.
“He’s still alive,” Virginia State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller confirmed to ABC News.
Harris’s uncle said Harris’s boyfriend was in the passenger seat at the time of the crash. He described her death as a “a freak accident.”
“She was driving, her boyfriend was in the passenger seat, when all of a sudden comes this body into the windshield,” Everett Bruce told ABC News. Bruce said he learned about the crash when his younger brother, Harris’s father, called him two hours later.
The state police confirmed in a statement that the “front-seat passenger” was “was not injured” as a result of the collision.
“He’s a little bit in shock,” Bruce added of Harris’s boyfriend.
The news of Harris’s death shook Bruce, but he said her father is especially devastated.
“His heart is crushed, I could tell by the conversation,” Bruce said. “Marisa was his only child and she was daddy’s girl.”
But as for why she died, Bruce said his emotions are a mix of fury and confusion.
“This boy is 12 years old, why would he commit suicide?” Bruce said. “I don’t get it.”
Bruce said that Harris grew up in Olney, Maryland and had traveled the world.
She was a graduate student studying clinical psychology.
As an undergraduate, Harris attended Towson University.
Bruce said his niece was just getting started to live an altruistic life helping children.
“She didn’t even get an opportunity to begin her life,” Bruce said. “She was just snatched too young, too early. She was just starting to blossom in her life and this freak accident happened. That’s what kills me.”
“Out of all the cars on the highway this had to happen to her,” Bruce added. “It’s like playing Russian roulette, somehow it was chosen that it would be her car at that time.”
Neither Harris’s mother nor father had responded to ABC News’ request for comment at the time of publication.
via: http://abc7.com/news/woman-killed-when-12-year-old-boy-jumps-off-highway-overpass/2584562/
BOY, 8, BULLIED AT SCHOOL DAYS BEFORE KILLING HIMSELF
The 8-year-old hanged himself with a necktie in the bedroom of his Cincinnati home on Jan. 26. School officials called the boy’s mother the day her son was bullied and said he had fainted, attorney Carla Leader told The Associated Press.
“They didn’t tell her the whole story,” Leader said. “The school also said his vitals were fine and he was alert.”
The mother learned of the bullying and the surveillance video after her attorneys obtained a Cincinnati police investigative file over her son’s death. The file included a copy of a Feb. 3 email from a homicide detective to an assistant principal at Carson Elementary School and other Cincinnati school officials describing what he saw on the video obtained from the school district’s security department.
Cincinnati Public Schools, in a statement issued Thursday, did not address the allegation that officials at the elementary school didn’t tell the boy’s mother what had happened. School district spokeswoman Janet Walsh said the detective “mischaracterized the events in the video,” the existence of which was first reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Leader said she watched the surveillance video and that it shows another boy acting aggressively toward students. When the 8-year-old approached him and tried to shake his hand, the boy threw him against the wall, knocking him unconscious, Leader said.
Other students stepped over the boy while others poked him with their feet as he lay unconscious for 7 minutes before an assistant principal and then a school nurse came to his aid, Leader said. The mother came to get the 8-year-old after the school called her.
The mother took him to a hospital that evening after the boy vomited and complained of stomach pains. Doctors said he had a stomach virus and sent him home. Neither doctors nor the boy’s mother knew what had happened earlier that day, her attorneys said.
The ages of the other children involved or present at the attack were not immediately available. The elementary school’s website shows that it serves children from prekindergarten through the sixth grade and has 750 students.
The Cincinnati Public School statement provides a different version of events. It says that “while we are concerned about the length of time that (the boy) lay motionless and the lack of adult supervision at the scene,” school administrators followed protocol by having the nurse evaluate him. The boy’s mother was asked to pick him up and take him to a hospital “to be checked out,” the statement said.
The mother’s attorneys said her sister, who was caring for the boy while she was at work that night, called to tell her the boy had been vomiting.
Leader described the boy as a “happy-go-lucky kid” who had shown no signs of mental issues. Leader said the boy came home from school on Jan. 26, spoke with his mother and went into his bedroom. She later discovered him hanging from his bunk bed.
The email from the homicide detective, which was shared with The Associated Press, describes what he saw in the surveillance video. The detective said it appeared that the “primary agitator” hit one child in the stomach, sending him to the floor on hands and knees. The 8-year-old then approached the aggressor and tried to shake his hand but was pulled to the floor, the detective wrote.
The aggressor “appears to celebrate and rejoice in his behavior as (the boy) lay motionless. For many minutes, many students step over, point, mock, nudge, kick” the boy, the email said.
The detective told school officials that while he had concerns about the bullying, which could be considered a criminal assault, he added that the school would be better suited to handle the situation because of the children’s ages.
Meanwhile, the coroner has reopened its investigation into the boy’s suicide, and his school district is expected to release video showing the incident.
A Hamilton County coroner’s office spokesman said Friday that new evidence has prompted the reopening of the case, but he wouldn’t say what that evidence is.
A Cincinnati schools spokeswoman says the video might be released Friday.