(1/04/07 - HOUSTON) - Police and family members said a 10-year-old boy who died by hanging himself from a bunk bed was apparently mimicking the execution of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Sergio Pelico was found dead Sunday in his apartment bedroom in the Houston-area city of Webster, said Webster police Lt. Tom Claunch. Pelico's mother told police he had previously watched a news report on Saddam's death.

 "It appears to be accidental," Claunch said. "Our gut reaction is that he was experimenting."

An autopsy of the fifth-grader's body was pending.

Julio Gustavo, Sergio's uncle, said the boy was a happy and curious child.

He said Sergio had watched TV news with another uncle on Saturday and asked the uncle about Saddam's death.

"His uncle told him it was because Saddam was real bad," Gustavo said. "He (Sergio) said, 'OK.' And that was it."

Sergio's mother, Sara Pelico DeLeon, was at work Sunday while Sergio and other children were under the care of an uncle, Gustavo said. One of the children found Sergio's body in his bedroom.

Police said the boy had tied a slipknot around his neck while on a bunk bed. Police investigators learned that Sergio had been upset about not getting a Christmas gift from his father, but they don't believe the boy intentionally killed himself.

Clinical psychologist Edward Bischof, of California, said children Sergio's age mimic risky behaviors they see on TV -- such as wrestling or extreme sports -- without realizing the dangers. He said TV appeared to be the stimulant in Sergio's case.

"I would think maybe this kid is trying something that he thinks fun to act out without having the emotional and psychological maturity to think the thing through before he acts on it," Bischof said.

Family members held a memorial for the boy Wednesday in the apartment complex activity center. Gustavo said the family is trying to put together enough money to send Sergio's body to Guatemala for burial.

"I don't think he thought it was real," Gustavo said of Saddam's hanging. "They showed them putting the noose around his neck and everything. Why show that on TV?"

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Another 'Saddam suicide'
04/01/2007 14:19  - (SA)    

Kolkata, India - A 15-year-old girl from eastern India hanged herself in response to the execution of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, police and family members said on Thursday.

"She said they had hanged a patriot. We didn't take her seriously when she told us that she wanted to feel the pain Saddam did during the execution," the girl's father, Manmohan Karmakar, told AFP by phone from the town of Kharda.

He said his daughter, called Moon Moon, had become extremely depressed after watching Saddam's execution on television.

"She kept watching the scene over and again and didn't take food on Saturday and Sunday to protest the hanging," he said.

Police superintendent Pravin Kumar confirmed the suicide, saying the girl had strung herself up from a ceiling fan and was found dead early on Wednesday.

The communist-ruled state of West Bengal has condemned Saturday's execution of Saddam, with thousands of people taking to the streets.

Moon-moon's parents deserve to be beaten with sticks for giving her such a dopey name, much less not "taking her seriously." When a 15 year old kid talks about suicide, it's a bloody dire emergency. Period. End of discussion. What rock have these parents been living under?

Uncle Julio, on the other hand, is partly right.  Uncle Julio believes that seeing Saddam's execution on TV was the problem. He is almost right. Death and violence are usually depicted on television entertainment programs as completely detached from any consequences. This blurs the line between fiction and reality to the point where an average 10 year old kid who is "curious" might conduct a fatal experiment, as did young Sergio.

When we watch the TV cop shows, we are treated to depictions of dead corpses far more badly mutilated than the hanged Saddam, and the latest "procedural dramas" (e.g. the CSI shows) deliver even more anatomical, detached views of death. The latest addition in this season's fare seems to be the stock shot of a post-autopsy corpse, with a hastily-sutured Y incision on its chest (male corpses only, of course).

A kid sees all this fake death on the tube, but great-grandma is whisked off to a hospice or nursing home to die, and the fiction/reality line blurs even further. Tragic as little Sergio's death may be, deaths of this sort are inevitable in today's world.

And there is where I take issue with the Parents Television Council and other pecksniffs. The violence/sex on television is not in itself the problem. It's the blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality. Anybody who knows a dedicated soap-opera fan should understand the seriousness of this blurring, and that it is not simply limited to children.