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Friday, January 05, 2007

This guy would get a Darwin Award if he hadn't been ten years old
Posted by Jill | 6:59 AM
Something about this story about the ten-year-old who hanged himself after showing curiosity about the execution of Saddam Hussein just seems fishy:

A 10-year-old boy hanged himself accidentally on New Year’s Eve after watching reports of Saddam Hussein’s execution, the police and relatives said Thursday.

Family members discovered the body of the boy, Sergio Pelico, hanging from his bunk bed and called the police in Webster, between Houston and Galveston.

The boy watched television reports on Saturday and asked about the execution, said an uncle, Adolfo Chavez.

“He asked, ‘Is this how they killed people?’ ” Mr. Chavez recounted in Spanish. “We said, ‘No, but they did it to this man because he’s bad.’ ”

Mr. Chavez said his nephew had said nothing more about the hanging.

The next night, as adults prepared supper and his cousins played, Sergio went upstairs to his bedroom. Another child found the body, Mr. Chavez said.

Capt. Thomas Claunch of the Webster police said there was no reason to suspect suicide.

“It was nothing more than a tragic accident,” Captain Claunch said. “I think he was trying to mimic the behavior, and it got out of hand. There were no indications of depression, no problems within the home. He was very positive.”

The captain said Sergio, an only child who was in the fifth grade, had given his mother a belated Christmas card. “In it,” Captain Claunch said, “he says he will do better in school this year, that he wants to get her a better Christmas present next year.”


First of all, there seems to be a rush to call this a "tragic accident" rather than a suicide, when you have a kid who clearly felt inadequate, not just about his performance in school, but about the Christmas present he gave his mother. How inadequate remains to be seen, but one has to wonder whether this kid thought that he too was "bad" because of his school performance and deserved to hang.

Then there's the less likely possibility that this boy was playing the "asphyxiation game", in which kids try for a free, and what they believe to be safe, high by choking themselves, then reviving, for the purpose of the oxygen rush after regaining consciousness. This boy was in the prime demographic for this so-called "game".

It's also interesting in the coverage of this story, which is sad no matter what actually happened, there is no hand-wringing about the impact on children of showing a real-life hanging, or even the moments just prior, not like the uproar that occurred when a pop star dared to show a breast on national television.
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