Yesterday afternoon, a Brooklyn man was apprehended after threatening a City College student and holding what looked like a gun--but turned out to be a pellet gun--against the head of another student. The police convinced him to drop the gun and Kirk Hanley, 22, who had also pointed the gun at his own head, was found with suicide notes and taken to St. Luke's Roosevelt for observation. The incident took place at City College's Harlem......

Starting today, teams of six NYPD officers will be patrolling the subway system in 12 hour shifts to thwart would-be terrorists. You’ll be able to easily identify the squads – called “Torch Teams” – by their rifles, MP5 submachine guns, handguns, body armor and bomb-sniffing dogs. The program is being paid for with $151 million from taxpayers nationwide, allocated through D.C. The Torch Teams will function like the similarly equipped NYPD “Hercules Teams” (pictured) above......

After a 12-year-old Brooklyn girl killed herself, her mother is speaking out against her peers and her school. Last week, Mercedes Herrera found her daughter Maria near death in her bedroom closet. Maria, who had tied a belt around her neck, died shortly thereafter at Brookdale Hospital. Initial reports of Herrera's death noted that she was upset that her stepfather wouldn't let her visit a friend, but her mother detailed her classmates' cruel behavior. Mercedes......

Last night a gunman on the run in the Bronx got stuck in Yankees' post-game gridlock after stealing a Con Ed van. Then he took his own life before police could apprehend him. Yesterday's game went down to the wire, and it was 9:44 p.m. when Mariano Rivera threw the last pitch (the batter grounded into a game-ending throw to first base). As fans filtered out of Yankee Stadium to either hop on a train......

Photograph of police investigating the United Nations death by John Heilprin/AP After the discovery of a woman's body on the lawn of the United Nations building, the police have identified the woman as Maria DiBiase, who worked with the Austrian consulate. According to the Daily News, DiBiase "apparently jumped after showing up for work at the UN early Sunday." The 44-year-old appears to have leaped from the 19th floor and her body was found......

NYC - United Nations Headquarters, by wallyg at flickr A woman appears to have fallen or jumped from a very high floor of the U.N. Secretariat Building at 405 East 42nd St. early today. Per wcbstv.com, U.N. security personnel escorted detectives and NYPD officers to the rear of the building, where the woman's body was splayed out on the lawn. She was quickly covered with a sheet and the area was cordoned with yellow......

Yoko Ono isn't showing an ounce of compassion for heavy metal musician (and Suicide Girl) Lennon Murphy, who was named after the late Beatle by her mother. Ono is now suing the musician for "tarnishment" of John Lennon's name, "fraudulently" registering the name as a trademark and intentionally exploiting it. Lennon has been using her first name professionally since 1997, and in 2000 (when signed with Arista Records) she cleared the use of the name......

MUSIC: Come enjoy the Whitney after dark tonight as the museum's live showcase series invites Dan Deacon (pictured) to the stage. If you haven't seen Deacon before, get ready for some Casio keyboard electro-rock compositions and an art dance party. Friday // 7pm // Whitney Museum [945 Madison Ave] // Pay what you want EVENT: The Moth Story Shop presents “The One that Got Away: Stories from South Street Seaport” tonight. The following storytellers will......

A Bay Ridge pharmacist embroiled in a public steroid investigation appears to have killed himself. John Rossi was found last night in the office above the pharmacy, with a fatal gunshot wound to his head and a pistol in his hand. Bottles of Johnnie Walker whiskey, Valium, and Coca-Cola were on the desk in front of his body; another bullet slug was found in the office, causing a police source to tell the Daily News,......

An executive at a subprime loan company that was financially circling the drain stated that the murder of his wife and consequent suicide was not related to money worries, but personal problems. Walter Buczynski was a 59-year-old vice president of Fieldstone Mortgage Corp., a mortgage lending company sinking into bankrupty. He'd told neighbors that he would soon be looking for a new job, but they didn't sense an irregular level of distress. Nonetheless, Buczynski broke......

The family and friend of the Minnesota tourist who took a fatal plunge from a Midtown hotel this past weekend are saying her death is not a suicide. Twenty-one-year-old Jennifer Olson fell 60 feet from a fire escape at the Night Hotel and earlier reports suggested she jumped, but her friend, Timothy O'Neill, told the Daily News, "I don't believe it was suicide. I believe it was accidental. After drinking six or seven hours, people......

A 21-year-old woman visiting New York City from a small town in Minnesota killed herself Friday evening by jumping from the fire escape of a midtown hotel. The suicide ended a weekend that was the result of winning tickets to Friday night's Z100 Jingle Ball concert at Madison Square Garden. Jennifer Olson was from the town of Eveleth, Minnesota, population: 3,000. She checked into the Night Hotel on 45th St. with her male friend Timothy......

The NY Post has another story in the ongoing ogling at Theresa Duncan's death. The East Village artist apparently "fell into suicidal depression after telling friends that oddball rocker Beck backed out of her movie project." So now we have yet another baffling peek into the paranoid mindset Duncan and her long time boyfriend Jeremy Blake were in when they committed suicide, just one week apart from each other. In the January issue of Vanity......

MOVIE: BAM pays homage to the late Barbara Stanwyck tonight with a screening of Forbidden. The 1932 Frank Capra-directed film (which tells the tale of a librarian who has fallen for an unobtainable/married man) was supposedly influenced by his real-life affair with the leading lady. Critic and historian Elliott Stein will discuss the film after the 6:50 screening. 4:30, 6:50 and 915pm // BAM Rose Cinemas [30 Lafayette Ave., Fort Greene] // $11 Meanwhile, the......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Prospect Pl. in Brooklyn, a collapse at Flushing Ave. at Portland Ave. in Brooklyn, and an armed robbery on 157th St. and 109th Ave. in Queens. The Queens courtroom where three cops will be tried on charges of shooting Sean Bell to death is undergoing $175K in renovations in preparation for the trial, even though attorneys for the defense are arguing for a change of venue.......

Last year, there was a very sad report about a 14-year-old boy who committed suicide by jumping into the frigid waters of the East River, and his mother suggested it was because of school bullying. Now the Daily News reports that the Administration for Children's Services had been investigating a charge that the boy's mother had choked him and beat his brother with a belt. Last March, Sidney Hatchett and his 6-year-old sister were walking......

What a bad idea: NY1 reporter Gary Anthony Ramsay apparently made a crank call to his station's live call-in program, "The Call," and now he's fired. The Daily News reports that Ramsay's crank call revealed his opinions about former police commissioner Bernard Kerik. A NY1 spokesperson told the News that the journalist who logged 15 years at the cable station "left New York 1 to pursue other options," but NY1 sources "said Ramsay committed journalistic......

This summer, when Jeremy Blake walked into the Rockaway Beach surf, he left many with a lot of questions...and he left his life's work behind. His films, C-prints, drawings and paintings are now hanging in homage at his memorial exhibit at Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen. Opening last week and running through January 5th, the show will even include the incomplete piece he was still working on at the time of his death:His sixth solo exhibition......

A Brooklyn family and the police have differing views on the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Khiel Coppin on Monday night. Coppin's mother Denise Owens had called 911 because Coppin was acting irrationally. The police released the 911 call, where Owens speaks with a 911 operator and Coppin is yelling in the background; you can read the transcript here and listen here, but here's an excerpt:Background male voice: "Take that, (expletive). I've got a......

After responding to a woman's 911 call about a domestic dispute with her son, the police fired between 13 and 20 times at the son, who claimed he had a gun. The gunfire killed 18-year-old Khiel Coppin and it turned out he was only holding a hairbrush. Coppin had been arguing with his mother in their Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, and when police arrived, came out to the window ledge, "screaming and acting irrationally," according to......

The local papers have some details about the NYU sophomore who was found dead in his dorm room Friday night. Police says 19-year-old Pranay Angara suffocated himself with a plastic bag. Angara, who is from Hopewell Junction in upstate New York, lived in the Water Street dorm at 200 Water Street in the Financial District. The police say he wrote a note for his family and that he pushed a dresser in front of the......

A sophomore at New York University was found dead in his Water Street dorm room on Friday night. The Washington Square News reports that other residents were told about the death on Saturday and that the university did not send out an NYU community-wide email per a request from the deceased students' parents: "The family has asked that they be accorded the utmost privacy, and the university will do its best to honor its wishes......

Fun Fun Fun Fest 2007 Recap from Super!Alright! on Vimeo Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of Texas's only feminist bookstore. Throughout the week, they interviewed a bunch of indie fashion designers and D-I-Y websites—Etsy, Ornamental Things, 31 Corn Lane, and Aorta Designs—for the upcoming Stitch Fashion Show. They also did......

A bookkeeper for a Manhattan printing company pleaded not guilty to killing his 13-month-old daughter. Peter O'Keffe was arrested on Sunday after his wife returned to their Queens home after running errands on Saturday, to find their child unresponsive on the floor and her husband missing. Prosecutors say that O'Keeffe hit the baby in order to make her stop crying. From the Queens DA's office:According to statements made to police following his arrest, O’Keeffe admitted......

When it comes to driving routes for a JFK airport pickup, George Costanza advocates taking the Grand Central to the Van Wyck, deriding Kramer’s L.I.E. route as a “suicide mission.” In the current New York Magazine cover story, “How to Escape Airport Hell”, the editors invited chauffeur Kevin Sullivan to weigh in. While he comes down squarely on Costanza’s side, he also shares some invaluable alternative routes to all three airports in the unlikely......

Note to public servants: Your embarrassing MySpace pages will get the tabloid once-over if you do something totally stupid. Last week, police officers Thomas Eliassen and Michael Danese were arrested after they stranded a 14-year-old boy who had been egging cars at a remote swamp. Now Eliassen's MySpace page, where he proclaims, "LET'S DO LINES OFF A STRIPPERS A--!!!", is getting attention from the boy's lawyer. The boy, Rayshawn Moreno, claimed the officers also made......

It’s become quite fashionable for the “downtown” theater scene to inject their productions with live punk rock stylings. (Though the stated intentions vary, I can’t help but theorize that it’s got something to do with a terminally unhip theater geek’s longing for coolness.) The big problem with most of these wannabe rock shows is twofold: the music invariably sucks and the lyrics – ostensibly important for dramatic purposes – are unintelligible. (Essential Self Defense......

We guess that we don't have a Golden Gate Bridge to complain about, but a lot of our out-of-towners are in the Big Apple to off themselves. The Daily News reports that a new study shows "more than one in 10 people who kill themselves in Manhattan are 'suicide tourists'" and they choose NYC landmarks to do so! Men are mostly to blame for seeking out better-known landmarks like bridges or historic landmarks to leap......

A 23-year-old Queens woman was saved from a disease that was destroying her kidneys by a most-willing donor: her fiancé. Jarena Bates and Tye Johnson met when Johnson was delivering a couch in Queens and Bates answered the door. They began dating soon after and have been together for five years, getting engaged in January. Bates, who was diagnosed with a kidney disorder when she was 14 years old was diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome shortly......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian struck on 11th Ave. and West 43rd St. in Manhattan, a shooting on 21st St. in Queens, and a shooting on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. Veteran political reporter Gabe Pressman weighs in on the wave of mortgage foreclosures sweeping New York and finds overwhelming evidence of racism. A privately funded program to encourage lower income and minority students to take Advanced Placement courses will pay cash for......