5 suicides and 2 fatal ‘ODs’ in Columbia’s semester of heartbreak
Stress, isolation blamed as a series of student deaths rocks Ivy campus
AT 18, Taylor Gilpin Wallace seemed destined for a bright future.
Handsome and athletic, he had been a track star, a football star, National Honors Society president and valedictorian at his high school in tiny Brookfield, Mo.
And he had been accepted at Columbia University.
“He had his entire life mapped out in front of him,” his mother, Angie, told The Post.
“He wanted to be a heart surgeon and do whatever it took to get there.”
But two months after moving into his single-bed dorm room, Wallace quit school, returned home to Missouri, and hanged himself in his basement.
Wallace became the second of the school’s five students to commit suicide since the semester began in September. Two others died of apparent drug overdoses.
The deaths include three last month alone — one a Japanese exchange student who leapt from a seventh-floor dorm window.
The four other suicides happened once each month from September through December, and include a literature student from Morocco, a 21-year-old budding journalist and a 29-year-old Navy veteran.
“You have a child who comes from middle America,” Angie Wallace said. “He was surrounded by kids who had a social life, and he just didn’t connect with the kids. He was popular at home, but not at Columbia.”
“And it was the pressure of school,” the mom said, echoing a common theme among students who spoke to The Post.
NEARLY every Columbia student The Post interviewed during repeated visits to the Morningside Heights campus said relentless academic stress and a failure of the school to proactively address student mental health has contributed to the tragedies.
“It’s all coming at you at once,” said freshman Isabel Weil, 18.
“This is such a good school, and everybody here has earned getting in — they’re all very smart.”
Then “you realize as these deaths are happening that maybe some people maybe feel it more than you do,” she said.
The fall semester’s deaths came with steady, depressing regularity.
The first was on Sept. 6. Uriel Florez, 29, shot himself with a shotgun in his Nutley, NJ, home — 10 minutes before his mother returned home from work.
A Navy corpsman who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Florez had left behind two-dozen handwritten suicide notes, said his sister, Natalie Candela, 43.
Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder had taken a heavy toll, she said.
Then there was stress of Columbia — although Candela did not believe her brother had reached out to counselors there, or anywhere.
“He was an ‘A’ student,” at his first school, Bergen Community College in Paramus, “but at Columbia he was not,” Candela said.
“I know he was disappointed; it’s different to be competing at the town level than at the Olympic level.”
The second suicide came Oct. 27, when Wallace took his life in the basement of his parents’ home in Missouri.
The third was on Nov. 22, when Nicole Katherine Orttung, 21, of Arlington, Va., killed herself during a visit home from school.
Orttung was already a promising journalist.
Writing for the Columbia Spectator and the Christian Science Monitor — where she published some 100 articles — she strived to right social injustices.
She wrote frequently about the public schools near Columbia’s campus, where, according to her obituary, she also volunteered.
THE fourth suicide was on Dec. 18, when Mounia Abou-said, a senior literature major from Morocco, was found dead in her eighth-floor dorm room at the Broadway Residence Hall at Broadway and West 114th Street.
A plastic bag was around her head, and she may have been dead for several days, according to police and student sources.
The fifth suicide came Jan. 18, when Yi-Chia “Mia” Chen, an exchange student from Tokyo’s Waseda University, jumped from the seventh floor of her dorm at Broadway and 113th Street.
Police sources say the sixth and seventh deaths are assumed drug ODs — narcotics paraphernalia was recovered at both scenes, sources said, although confirmatory toxicology results are still pending.
On Jan. 21, Ezekiel “Zeke” Reiser, 21, was found dead in the West 87th Street apartment he shared with his parents, Columbia adjunct faculty members Nanako Umemoto and Jesse Reiser.
And on Jan. 23, first-year student Daniel Andreotti, 20, of Ames, Iowa, was found dead inside his dorm in Hartley Hall at Amsterdam Avenue and West 115th Street.
Although many lived within a block of each other, there is no indication that any of the students knew one another.
“He didn’t leave his room very much,” Wallace’s mother said.
Despite repeated inquiries by The Post Wednesday and Thursday, the administration at Columbia declined to answer questions about the past semester’s alarming number of student deaths.
But clearly, the administration is grappling with the tragedies.
AS students died over five months, James Valentini, the dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education, had issued carefully worded condolence e-mails on the lost students.
The e-mails largely avoided the words suicide and drugs, and each featured similar boilerplate lists of counseling resources.
But on Thursday, when The Post broke details of the deaths online, the school was the one asking for help.
“As individuals and a community we come together to ask — really to insist — on understanding what more we can do to ad- dress the depression and addiction that is so often the cause of these losses,” the school’s vice president for university life, Suzanne Goldberg, wrote in a mass e-mail to students.
The message detailed “what we have, and, after this, what more we will do.”
The new resources included a spring semester Mental Health Week, additional on-campus crisis intervention training for students and community members, and, as recently requested by student leaders, more space and funding for community-building “activities.”
TAYLOR WALLACE’S grades at Columbia were excellent — he got 100 percent on a chemistry test, the only one among some 300 students in the class to do so.
But in hourlong, nightly Facetime calls from his lonely dorm room, the teen would pour out his heart to his mother, describing his feelings of isolation and inferiority.
In one call, he told her, “You don’t know how badly I want to jump out that window right now.”
The mother had told the head of Columbia’s Counseling and Psychological Services Office that her son suffered depression and hung the office’s card up in Wallace’s dorm.
But she told The Post she believes he never reached out to school counselors, nor they to him.
“I definitely feel there’s more that should have been done,” she said.
On the day of his suicide, Wallace and his family visited another college, Truman State University, an hour’s drive north in Kirksville, Mo.
He told his family he would reenroll there.
That night, Wallace played catch with his 15-year-old brother in the front yard, took a nap in the living room, then, as his mother made dinner, went down into the basement, saying merely that he needed to charge his cellphone.
When she called down to him to come up to eat, he said he wasn’t hungry.
Thirty minutes later, his dad was getting ready to go to Wal- mart and went downstairs to get his son.
“He flipped on the light, and Taylor was hanging,” the mother told The Post.
Wallace’s kid brother ran downstairs and cut the belt. They performed CPR and felt a weak pulse, but Wallace died at the hospital.
The family has set up the Taylor Gilpin Wallace Foundation for Suicide Prevention in hopes of raising awareness and helping prevent other tragedies.
“He’s never really experienced failure,” the mom said.
“And he was so afraid of failing.”