Kindle
On January 1st, 2007, Loren Coleman blogged,
Saddam Hussein has been executed (and now it's on YouTube) School shootings: malignant, contagious social meme? LA train wreck: the copycat effect
[The new year] opens with the news of the death of a nine-year-old who died by hanging, as he attempted to imitate the widely broadcast Saddam Hussein execution video. This press account, "Boy hangs himself 'like Saddam'", includes the details of the young person's death and the realizations from some media critics that the video being shown is graphic:And today, Loren updates,
On Monday, I posted here about the death of Mubashar Ali, 9, who hanged himself in Pakistan, on Sunday, December 31, 2006, while copycatting the execution of Saddam Hussein.Link to first post (about copycat hanging #1), Link to second post (about copycat hangings #2 and #3)Two more copycat hangings of young people have occurred in the wake of the widespread broadcasts of the Saddam hanging video on cable and satellite television, and the entire video on such outlets as YouTube. In Texas, Sergio Pelico, 10, was found Sunday, December 31, 2006, dead from hanging from his bunk bed in an apparent copycat of the Saddam death. In India, early on Wednesday, January 3, 2007, Moon Moon Karmarkar, 15, hanged herself from a ceiling fan.
Previously on BB:
Reader comment: ttrentham says,
Here's a Houston Chronicle story about the boy in Houston who hanged himself apparently trying out what he saw on TV. It isn't the same source linked by Loren Coleman's Copycat Effect blog: Link.