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Jacob Rogers

​Joe Jervis of Joe My God (the political blog honored last night at the Voice web awards), Dan Savage (whose syndicated column appears weekly in the Voice) and the website Towleroad are all raising money for the funeral of Tennessee teenager Jacob Rogers, who committed suicide yesterday.

As Jervis reported, "Rogers killed himself after complaining about anti-gay bullying from his classmates that had forced him to drop out of school. Rogers left suicide notes that included the passwords for his phone and his email so that authorities could view what he had endured."

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​It was a big day for American capitalism yesterday. Nothing captured the dichotomy of how citizens were thinking about it better than the above tweet on how a captain of industry was being eulogized (after the suicides of his de-facto factory workers have largely been ignored), on the same day Wall Street was under an assault like it's never seen at the hands of the American public*.

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I didn't cry when I heard that former Baltimore pitcher (and current Orioles TV color commentator) Mike Flanagan shot himself in the head Wednesday afternoon. I did tear up a bit when I heard that Jim Palmer started to cry in the broadcast booth while conveying the news to the Baltimore faithful.

I didn't know Mike Flanagan well, but I interviewed him several times, both for the Village Voice and Inside Sports when the Orioles were at Yankee Stadium in the early 1980s. He was intelligent, courteous and always happy to talk about baseball — three things most professional athletes are not.

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​Foxconn, makers of the iPhone as well as products for Sony, Nokia, Dell and Hewlett Packard, plans to automate much of its manufacturing load. Last year they doubled wages after more than a dozen workers at its plant in southern China committed suicide. It was so bad, the factory had to install suicide nets from the rafters. Now, after more reported suicides, the company has decided to increase its automated workforce from 10,000 robots to a million in 3 years. Hey, it's easier than raising wages again!

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​Joseph Brooks, Oscar-winning songwriter and accused rapist, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment today in what police are calling a suicide. He was 73. Brooks was found with a dry cleaning bag over his head, near a hose attached to a helium tank. Police have a suicide note but will not release it. Brooks was awaiting trial on charges that he raped several young actresses who he lured to his apartment promising them film auditions. He was charged with a stunning 82 counts of sexual abuse. On top of that, his son, 25-year-old Nick Brooks, is also in trouble with the law: he's accused of strangling his girlfriend Sylvie Cachay at SoHo House. The Brooks family saga is beginning to resemble a Shakespeare tragedy. 

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​Ryan Santanna, a 21-year-old from Roosevelt Island, jumped off a 15th floor balcony to his death after smoking salvia, a legal herb, with his ex-girlfriend, she told the New York Daily News. According to the paper, the pair were on their stomachs looking over the edge, "pretending to swim like an animal," when all of a sudden Santanna got up to jump. "He stared at me but it was like he wasn't seeing me; it was just a blank stare," said Benazir Balani, who was with Santanna at the time. "He just ran and hopped over the fence. He had no idea who he was, what he was doing."

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​Police sources tell the New York Post today that Cesar Mercado, the 34-year-old Nicaraguan diplomat found dead in his South Bronx apartment last month during the U.N. General Assembly, committed suicide.

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"Save me!"

​If you're looking to snap an iconic photo of the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building at night between now and October 31, you're out of luck because it's peak migration season for birds, and they tend to crash into skyscrapers and plunge to their death when the lights are on, according to DNAInfo. Sad, but true -- 90,000 of the suckers die this way every year, so skyscrapers are dimming their lights so as not to interfere with migration.

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​It's not like anybody can stop you. Apparently, if you're going to jump off of a bridge today, it appears that our city's services really can't stop you, even if you just want them to call you on your bluff and need someone to talk to.

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