Publishing the name of the young man is important for other students who knew him to be aware of his passing and to mourn his death. NYU is a big campus and although word spreads fast the sooner someone is aware of what took place the sooner they can reach out to others or for help if needed. It is a shocking situation and horrible for all concerned. Hopefully we all have enough respect to mourn the loss of this young man without invading the families privacy.

I want to be clear about my comments for this article, which I fear did not incorporate the proper context - monitoring students with emotional disturbance and mental illness does absolutely happen at NYU and to a profound degree. The campus has made great strides and been enormously responsive to these concerns, setting up a system to track those students who are known to be struggling in ways that no other campus has done (e.g., through the Wellness Exchange and an integrated model that is a national award winner with over 20 leading universities following NYU's lead). In addition, the issue of whether an urban decentralized campus confers more risk is debatable, but there is no data to suggest that urban campuses present a greater risk for student suicide. The challenges of monitoring students on an urban campus are, in some ways, different but not greater.

Just because you release someone's name doesn't mean that that's a violation of the family's request for privacy. That just means don't mess with them while they're grieving. As someone commented the other day, this kid made his death public when he decided to take his own life in a 24/7 library.

Maybe if you make it harder for someone to committ suicide they may have more time to find help. Not a promise, but maybe a possibility

Are you seriously blaming members of the administration for this? That is ridiculous. As a two-time Alum of NYU, I can personally say that the school and it's administrators all do whatever they can to assist the students. This is a horribly tragic event and to place blame on someone or the institution for causing this makes it even worse.

This is New York City and this is, sadly, reality - if a person has fallen from a ten story drop famous for suicides, only one conclusion is usually drawn. Of course the medical examiner has the final say. But to say anything else implies even more devious assumptions, i.e., foul play or murder... Which no one at NYU would want to be the case, however the facts will tell.

Let's be a bit realistic here Sherlock, do you think he accidentally threw himself over the 12 foot lexan protective barrier? Or maybe the incredible hulk picked him up and flung him over the barrier, and to cover up his murder he wrote a suicide note, broke into his dorm room and placed it there? all w/o being detected.

i am not at all debating if it was or wasn't a suicide. That is pretty obvious. What I am saying is, it is still wrong to disclose before the official report.

I don't know when you graduated, but it sounds like you're not too familiar with the barriers in question. They're pretty high, so unless you're a professional high/pole jumper or really tall or have a chair or if you were physically thrown by someone, you'd have a hard time getting over them. If someone is truly intent on killing themselves, like this student was, they'll find a way around it.

Also, I don't think people enroll in school -- any school -- with the express goal of killing themselves: no one enjoys being depressed.

NYU really does make an effort to prevent suicides, you have to give them credit for that. Most people I know know the suicide hotline number by heart--they drill it into your head as soon as you get here. There is a sign on the door leading to the roof of my building with the Wellness Exchange number. They always tell you that help is there if you reach for it, and it's true. Help is always there, but no one can help you if you don't want to help yourself.

That said, Andrew's death is a terrible tragedy. I think more than the Lexan barriers along the perimeter of the Library, the library itself isn't very well designed--it's so depressing. I never study in there, because it's just so...I don't know. I always feel pressured, and the one time I went during the day it was so quiet, which I know a library is supposed to be, but under the florescent lights and varying shades of wood colors and grey, it felt like an isolated kind of silence, not a comfortable one. I couldn't imagine what it's like to be there in the early hours of the morning. And like everything else NYU, I feel like it's so large and easy to get lost and lonely and isolated in, and when you feel like that, it's easy to lose a sense of purpose and meaning and to forget that there are people who care about you. My heart goes out for Andrew and his family, and I hope that in addition to heightened safety procedures, NYU will make a more concerted effort to build a closer community.

I don't think this kid jumped because the library itself made him depressed. Given the history of Bobst and suicides in Bobst it seems more likely that this is a copy cat suicide, especially since Andrew was a transfer student in his first semester at NYU.