Family of Boy, 12, Who Hanged Himself Points to Bullying
Richard Salazar at a memorial for his 12-year-old half-brother, Joel Morales, who committed suicide in his home in East Harlem. Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Lizbeth Babilonia on Thursday at her son's memorial site. Yana Paskova for The New York Times
Joel Morales
By MICHAEL WILSON and JULIET LINDERMAN Published: May 31, 2012
Sadia Hashmi would often walk to school in East Harlem with her 12-year-old boy and a schoolmate of his, Joel Morales, also 12. Joel was very bright but was sometimes depressed over how other children treated him, and she asked him why they did that.
“Sometimes he would say he doesn’t know why,” said Ms. Hashmi, who is an occupational therapist at the school, Public School 102. “Sometimes he would say because he was small. They would say really mean things.”
Joel hanged himself from a shower curtain rod in his home on Tuesday night. He left no suicide note, but members of his family said that he killed himself because he had been repeatedly picked on by other students, so much so that he had transferred to a new school. They said when that did not end the harassment, the family requested to be moved to another housing project but was turned down.
On Thursday, a police spokesman said officers were investigating whether there had been any link between bullying and Joel’s death. The police said there was no record that he reported an incident at school or to the police, although officers did respond to a harassment complaint at his apartment on Oct. 21 when, Joel’s family said, several boys threw sticks and poles at him at their door.
While the circumstances leading to Joel’s death were uncertain Thursday, the issue of bullying has come to the fore in recent years after a series of suicides of young boys and girls around the country. Many states, including New York, have passed laws requiring schools to develop anti-bullying curriculums and to take action against students who harass others.
Bullying itself is rarely regarded a crime, but students accused of it have been charged under other laws; in New Jersey on Wednesday, prosecutors announced that they had charged three students with crimes including robbery, making threats and lying to authorities after, the authorities said, they picked on a 15-year-old student who then killed himself.
A spokeswoman for the New York City Education Department said Thursday that she could not comment on a specific case. The New York City Housing Authority said that written consent was required from the boy’s family before it could discuss the matter, and that no such consent had been communicated.
But children who knew Joel in his compact world — just blocks from school to home — say he was a victim of prolonged bullying.
Dorian Lawrence, 11, a classmate at Public School 57, said Joel did not report the times he was bullied.
“Just walk away,” Dorian said. “The day before he passed, I was with him. We were playing basketball. He was happy. But the kids came and bothered him, so we left and went to the park. They followed us there. Then we went to my house and waited for them to leave. They stayed 20 minutes outside, then left. We had to keep looking around to make sure they didn’t come back.”
Destynee Lewis, 11, a former classmate, said Joel was picked on for being short. “The bullies are a group of boys — 12, 9, 10, 11 — all different ages,” she said. “They told him he was ugly, and he’d tell the teacher, and the teacher would tell the parents” of the children who picked on Joel. “But it didn’t help.”
“People really picked on him, both inside and outside the school. I can’t say it, what they said, they were bad words,” Destynee said. “I felt angry and sad, because he was a nice kid and I’d stick up for him. They’d say, mind your business.”
Dave Ortiz, 38, a parent who lives across the street from P.S. 102, said that he did not believe bullying was a big problem at the school and that his 8-year-old daughter knew Joel to always be in low spirits. Once, “she said he was holding five pencils and was trying to stab himself,” he said.
Donald McGrier, 18, a neighbor of Joel’s, said he often saw the boy on his bike. “You could tell that something might have been wrong with him, but he wouldn’t really show it,” Mr. McGrier said. “He was very reserved.”
The anecdotes belied the smiling photographs of Joel published in The Daily News and The New York Post in the first reports of his death on Thursday. “I go to school, play video games and ride bikes,” the boy wrote on his Facebook page, The Daily News reported.
“My brother was loved, my brother was an angel,” Joel’s half-brother, Richard Salazar, 25, said on Thursday. Once, he organized a meeting of parents whose sons were bullying Joel, he said. They all pointed fingers at one boy. The day after the suicide, that boy showed up at a memorial of candles and scrawled messages of grief. “I told them to get out, not as nice as that,” he said.
Francisco Babilonia, 65, said Joel, his grandson, spoke to him about bullies. “He’d say, ‘Grandpa, they bother me and chase me. I don’t know what to do,’ ” Mr. Babilonia said. “I feel so bad. I’d say, ‘Call me if you have a problem that you can’t handle and I’ll help you.’ ”
Joel was a very young child when his father, Jose Morales, died. “We talked about his dad, good things, but not about how he died,” Mr. Salazar said. “He only knew that he was in heaven.”
The father, Mr. Salazar said, had jumped off a building to his death.
On July 19, 1957, five men stood at Ground Zero of an atomic test that was being conducted at the Nevada Test Site. This was the test of a 2KT (kiloton) MB-1 nuclear air-to-air rocket launched from an F-89 Scorpion interceptor. The nuclear missile detonated 10,000 ft above their heads.
A reel-to-reel tape recorder was present to record their experience. You can see and hear the men react to the shock wave moments after the detonation.
The placard reading "Ground Zero; Population Five" was made by Colonel Arthur B. "Barney" Oldfield, the Public Information Officer for the Continental Air Defense Command in Colorado Spring who arranged for the volunteers to participate.
The five volunteers were: Colonel Sidney Bruce Lt. Colonel Frank P. Ball (technical advisor to the Steve Canyon tv show) Major Norman "Bodie" Bodinger Major John Hughes Don Lutrel
and George Yoshitake, the cameraman (who wasn't a volunteer)
see George discuss his work photographing atomic and nuclear explosions in "Atomic Filmmakers."
Tsar Bomba - King of the Bombs - 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT
Uploaded by flyboy172r on Apr 19, 2007
The Tsar Bomba
October 30th 1961 - The Tsar Bomba, King of the Bombs, [Russian name that won't copy over] or Big Ivan.
This footage is courtesy of the documentary "Trinity and Beyond", directed by Peter Kuran, and other footage is courtesy of the Discovery channel. The original footage was from declassified Soviet Archives. The music used is from The Planets Suite composed by Gustav Holst. The movement is 'Mars: the Bringer of War'
Before I get into the details of the test, I want to clear up something very important. The title of this video is "Tsar Bomba - King of the Bombs - 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT". Understand now that this test wasn't the result of a detonation of 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT, but rather the nuclear yield EQUIVALENT of a detonation of 57,000,000 Tonnes of Trinitrotoluene. The actual weight of the device was 27 tonnes. And coincidentally, one tonne is taken as a metric tonne, or 1000 kilograms - (2200lbs). All units used in physics are metric. The reason the yield equivalent system is used is because the energy released from the explosion of a set amount of TNT is a constant.
Second to that: I KNOW THE SCREENSHOTS AT THE END ARE OF THE CLOUD OVER THE GROUND. The reason I made a mistake was because when I made this video I was using a 6 year old CRT monitor with numerous problems, some of which with the shading. I greatly regret it butI cant be bothered removing/re-uploading the video again so Ill just live with it.
The bomb was designed as a 100 Megaton device, not a 50 Megaton device. This was due to its 3 stage design: fission-fusion-fusion. There is fission initiator that when detonated, begins a fusion reaction. Then there is a further fast-fission detonation (With neutrons from the second stage) of a Uranium-238 tamper which boosts the yield by 50 Megatons. For the test, the Tsar had its Uranium tamper replaced with lead to reduce the maximum yield by half (To 50 Megatons).
The blast yield was equal to that of a blast of 57,000,000 Tonnes of TNT....or to put that into context: The weight of 270 Empire State Buildings worth of TNT. This makes the Tsar the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated in history. Think of the destruction at Hiroshima. The Tsar was 3800 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
The bomb's weight was 27 tonnes, and its dimensions were: 8 meters (26ft) in length, and 2 meters (6.5ft) in diameter.
It was air-dropped, from a modified Tupolev Tu-95 Bear, and it used a nylon parachute to slow its decent to give the crew time to escape.
The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 34,500 feet AGL (10,500 meters), and it detonated a little over three minutes later at an altitude of 13,100 feet AGL (4,000 meters). In this time: The Tu-95, travelling at a ground speed of 480kts (552mph, 864kph), travelled into the safe zone (about 45km from ground zero) and was therefore 79km away from the blast.
When the bomb detonated, immediately the temperature directly below and surrounding the detonation would have risen to millions of degrees. The pressure below the blast was 300 pounds per square inch, ten times the pressure in a car tyre. The light energy released was so powerful that it was visible even at 1000km (621 miles), with cloudy skies. The shockwave was powerful enough to break windows at even up to 900 kilometres (560 miles) from the blast. The shockwave was recorded orbiting the earth 3 times. The mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 64,000 meters (210,000 feet) before levelling out. The thermal energy from the blast was powerful that it could cause 3rd degree burns to a human standing 100 km (62 miles) away from the blast.
The radius of the fireball was 2.3 kilometres (1.4 miles). The blast radius (area in which total destruction ensured) was 13km (8 miles).
The most important thing to note is that this bomb was designed as a 100 Megaton device (Yield equivalent of 0.1 billion tonnes of TNT). If detonated, everything within a 48 kilometer (30 mile) diameter would be vaporised. Everything within a 195 kilometer (120 mile) diameter would be incinerated in a fireball. This would ensure total destruction of a large city like New York, Paris or London, as well as devastation on its outskirts.
Disclaimer: I do not hold any ownership or copyright to footage or audio of the Hindenburg disaster, nor have I made, making or seeking to make profit from it. This video is simply intended to be informative. All copyright belongs to its rightful owners.
The Aftermath of the largest nuclear detonation in history.
Uploaded by flyboy172r on Jul 13, 2007
History of this excerpt:
At the beginning of this excerpt, the explosion that you see is the 'Tsar Bomba' or 'Emperor Bomb' in English and it was detonated by the soviets on October 31st, 1961, on an island in the arctic sea to the north of Russia.
The weapon packed a yield of 57 Megatons on detonation, meaning that it was equal to the explosive force of 57,000,000 Tons of TNT, or 3800 times larger than the Hiroshima explosion. This monster bomb is famous for being the largest nuclear detonation on the face of this planet.
112 days earler the project to build the weapon, codenamed Ivan, was initiated by the soviet premier of the time Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.
3 years before the Tsar Bomba was detonated, Khrushchev was enstated as the Premier of the Soviet Union in March 1958, and shortly after his enstatment the Soviet Union issued a statement in which it planned to suspend nuclear weapons testing. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the United States President until at the time, and he issued this statement shortly after the Soviet Union's announcement: "The United States is prepared, unless testing is resumed by the Soviet Union, to withhold further testing on its part of atomic and hydrogen weapons for a period of one year from the beginning of the negotiations."
There was a nuclear weapons moratorium in effect from late 1958, the last nuclear weapon detonated by the United States being 'Titania', a small sub-kiloton device detonated on October the 30th 1958 in Nevada, the last device detonated in the Hardtack II series of tests. Almost exactly 3 years later, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba, effectively destroying the moratorium. The United States were furious. The Ambassador to the United Nations at the time was Adlai Stevenson, as pictured in the film giving this statement:
"Mr. Khrushchev has exploded his 'Giant Bomb' in cynical disregard of the United Nations. By this act, the Soviet Union have added injury to insult: They broke the moratorium on nuclear weapons testing. They have raised atmospheric pollution to new heights. They have started a new race for more deadly weapons. They have spurned the humanitarian appeal of the United Nations, and of all peace loving peoples. They have advanced no solid justification for exploding this monstrous and unnecessary weapon. They have been wholly unmoved by the dangers of radioactive fallout to the human race. The United States delegation deeply deplores this contempt for world opinion and we think that in the light of this sombre development, other delegations may wish to express their views on this shocking and distressing news. For today, Mr. Chairman, the world has taken a great leap backwards, toward anarchy and disaster."
The Narrator, William Shatner, then says: The Russians had Shattered the voluntary moratorium. The United States would follow suit with an extensive series of weapon tests, for massive retaliation.
The United States testing that was to follow the ending of the moratorium was codenamed Operation Nougat, a series of 69 nuclear weapon tests which began a month before the Tsar Bomba explosion. This was at the height of the aptly named 'Cold War' and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it stood not only as testing, but as a deterrent against Soviet aggression. Any nuclear attack by either country would have escalated and triggered a full-scale thermonuclear war in which many millions would have perished, and making much of the world inhospitable. These weapons designed and constructed by the United States and Russia were designed to protect the countries but instead, if the Cold War became a reality, they would have had the destructive power to destroy much of the human race.
The footage used in this video was obtained from the documentary: "Trinity and Beyond" (1995), written and directed by Peter Kuran (Production Company: Visual Concept Entertainment) I do not hold any ownership or copyright to footage or audio, nor have I made, am making or seeking to make profit from it. This video is simply intended to be informative. All copyright belongs to its rightful owners.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
