A New York University freshman was under the influence of hallucinogenic “magic mushrooms” and marijuana when he took a swan dive inside the school’s library – and his death was an accident, the city’s medical examiner said yesterday.
The ME’s ruling means that Stephen Bohler, 18, a member of the diving team from Irvine, Calif., did not intend to commit suicide Oct. 10 when he climbed onto the 10th-story balcony of the Bobst Library, spread his arms and leaped.
The teen’s mother, Carolyn Bohler, said the ME’s ruling confirmed her and her husband’s deep conviction that their son did not set out to kill himself.
“This is the only scenario that made any sense to us,” she said from California. “In a strange way, it’s a strange type of confirmation, the only way to understand the bizarreness of it all.”
Bohler’s fatal plunge was one of three taken by NYU students recently that left the shocked campus concerned about whether the three students had all chosen to end their lives.
The first death – of Jack Skolnik, 20, who jumped to his death in the library Sept. 12 – has been ruled a suicide.
The medical examiner is still investigating the circumstances leading to the death of Michelle Gluckman, 19, who plunged from a Manhattan apartment window Oct. 18.
Carolyn Bohler said of her son, a popular teen who loved exploring everything from languages to juggling, that “it helps a lot just to know he was happy, which we always knew he was.
“But of course, you don’t want a happy person to die either,” she said, saying “The biggest thing that makes me distressed is that I wish he had fully grasped ‘drugs wisdom.’ “
“It’s best not to take drugs at all, but if you take them, you have to understand how to do them,” she said. “If you take drugs, you’re not supposed to be alone and wandering in dangerous places. You’re supposed to be with friends.”
She said it was similar to having friends make sure someone who drinks doesn’t get behind the wheel.
“You should say to someone on mushrooms, ‘You can’t go up there’ and keep them with you.”
Bohler said she, her husband and daughter have received much support and someone told her of a Native American saying that “I’m standing with you.”
“If all your friends stand so close, you cannot fall. That image has helped me,” she said.
NYU spokesman John Beckman said that Bohler’s death was “a terrible tragedy. No matter how the medical examiner ruled, that would not have changed.”
He also noted that there was “an initial public rush to lump these three deaths together as though they were a single incident. But in reality each of them, it was clear, had its own motivations, history and circumstances.”