Thursday, splattering himself across 34th Street below.
Cameron (Kamran in Persian) Dabaghi came from Austin, Texas, where both of his parents were described as physicians. Nothing else could be learned about the family.
Police said Dabaghi left a suicide note in his dorm room saying he would be jumping off either the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River or the Empire State Building and apologizing. But the note did not explain why he chose suicide. Friends at Yale expressed surprise, saying they had no idea what was eating him up.
Dabaghi was a junior at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. His sister, Andrene, also attends Yale as a sophomore. They lived in the same dorm building for undergraduates.
Dabaghi spent the fall semester as an exchange student at Peking University and had only recently returned to the United States. He was an East Asian studies major with a fascination for China.
Dabaghi was the 34th person to jump from the Empire State Building since it opened in 1931, when it was the tallest building in the world. It is now only the third tallest building in the United States. The last suicide at the building was a man who jumped from a vacant office suite on the 69th floor in 2007.
Dabaghi jumped from the 86th floor observation deck, the spot open to tourists to gaze at the city around them. He had to scale a 10-foot barricade fence installed to discourage suicides. The guards saw him and tried to call him back, but Dabaghi kept going until he could drop over the side. It would have taken about seven seconds for him to hit the pavement below.
Louis Mosquea, 28, a guard at the front door of a store just across the street from where Dabaghi landed, said, “He came down in front of the Bank of America. Boom! It was an explosion. His body was shattered and his sneakers were scattered on the sidewalk.” Mosquea said pedestrians scattered in every direction, but one man ran toward the body and covered it with an umbrella
One guard told the New York Daily News, “I wasn’t quick. We tried to talk him down for a while. It’s not easy to get over these gates for a reason.”
Friends said Dabaghi was under constant pressure to perform well at school, but that is true generally at Yale. One friend told the Daily News, “He was joking around [Monday, three days before his suicide]. He never mentioned anything about being upset or going to New York.”
Jack Newman, Dabaghi’s tennis coach in Austin for five years, said, “You couldn’t ask for a better, smarter guy. He was a rock star and all the things you’d want in a student.”
