Links to other victims and related articles

(Copyright Vancouver Sun 1999) MONTREAL --

An anguished mother urged parents and teachers to be vigilant Thursday after her son died playing a so-called strangulation game."I want to send out a cry of alarm," said Nathalie Granger, whose son Sunny, 11, died last week."I don't want other mothers to go through this. We must tell kids at home, at school, tell them never to do this."The game consists of youngsters choking themselves or a friend until they almost lose consciousness. The idea is to get a kind of high and to see who can hold out the longest before releasing the choke hold.Granger said Sunny had talked to her about previous occasions when he'd used his hands to cut off air intake. The last time he tried the game was when he used a cord."He told me he's seen on the Internet that some youngsters did it with a cord and the buzz was stronger," Granger said in an interview on LCN, an all-news French-language TV channel."I told him, `Listen, sweetie, don't you ever do that because you can get stuck and strangle yourself,' " Granger said."He said, `Don't be afraid. There's no knot. You only have to loosen it later.' He promised he'd never do it," she added."He was very reckless, nothing scared him."Granger, who has two other children, said it's shocking that such material can be found on the Net by even the youngest readers."Who supervises Internet sites? It seems anyone at all can create a site and post material that's not right. All kids have access to it."A similar game is believed to have taken the life of an 11-year- old Vancouver boy found hanging in a school washroom three years ago.Another Quebec boy passed out in an elementary school in the Saguenay region but he suffered nothing more than a concussion.Granger's nine-year-old son, Christopher, told her that he and Sunny sometimes played at strangling themselves with their own hands.Granger said she now regrets having let her children watch horror movies because they make death look like a routine event. "My main message is that I shouldn't have let them do it. All sorts of things are made to seem banal, and we're not really aware of it."Police are investigating the death but Sunny's family and teachers have ruled out suicide.Granger said, "He was full of life, involved in theatre, folk- dancing, horseback riding and soccer.""Everybody liked him. The phone never stopped ringing. But he did something stupid and I'll never see him again."It's so senseless

More than 100 teen-agers, parents and teachers clustered near the intersection of 42nd and Center Streets at dusk Saturday, looking for support for ending the "Game"."What game?"Some of them call it 'Choke Trance' or 'The Hanging Game,'" said Shelley Schneider. "A lot of kids play this in groups."It's a deadly game, Schneider said, in which young people choke themselves using a rope in hope of attaining a high through partial asphyxiation. It is the game she says killed her son, Roy, on May 19."I know Roy didn't want to die," she said. "He had a job. A girlfriend. And when the police showed up, I heard one of them say that it looks like the game."Saturday's vigil was meant to raise awareness of the deadly practice. Many of the youths in attendance are students at Norris Middle School, Roy's school. Some waved signs, some held lighted candles. Others simply hugged one another.Dave and Mary McClanahan can empathize with Roy's family. They lost their own son to the same "game" a year and a half ago."It's still going on," Mary McClanahan said. "They've had four kids die of it since then. People still don't know about it."McClanahan wants all the local school districts to send letters home to parents warning them of the practice, as Millard schools did. Until then, concerned people will have to hope that rallies like Saturday's and word-of-mouth are enough to prepare parents.Credit: WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

Copyright Financial Times Information Limited Dec 24, 2002

Many schoolchildren are risking their lives by deliberately making themselves faint in order to feel as if they are flying, education experts have warned.The "stun game," which is played by several children, with one taking a big breath and holding it while the others push his or her chest until the child faints, is the latest fad in Japan's playgrounds.It is a game that reportedly becomes popular among schoolchildren about once every decade, but its danger was highlighted after an elementary school pupil suffered serious injuries last month.On Nov. 12, the fifth grader from Tokyo's Nerima-ku played the game with a senior student. The trick worked perfectly but instead of flying, the younger boy crashed to the ground, losing five teeth and suffering a serious bruise on his chin.The older boy reportedly learned how to play the "stun game" from a local junior high school student and did the same to several classmates earlier that day but fortunately without anyone getting injured.The game causes fainting by blocking blood circulation from the heart to the brain.Masahiko Ueno, a former head of the capital's Medical Examiner's Office, warned that the game could be potentially fatal."Children faint easily because their ribcage is not strong enough. It could be fatal if children damage vital organs when crashing to the ground," Ueno said."Schoolteachers must stop students from doing this."The stun game has spread among children by word of mouth. It has even got a mention on several Internet message boards.The last time it surfaced was about a decade ago.A Kagoshima junior high school teacher recalled one of his students fainting in the classroom after playing the game in 1994."He did not get hurt and regained consciousness within seconds so we did not file a formal report to authorities. This is a kind of game that children participate in periodically," the teacher said

These are just three article inserts; There are many more links in StillLovingMyGabriel.tripod.com

If any of you who read this knows of a way to get an educational componant implemented into our public school 'Health, Sex Ed. or Drug Awareness' programs please get in touch with me. The number of kids who have died as the result of this game continues to go up. Each day counts; The sooner parents, caregivers, teachers, law enforcement, medical personel, EMT's and the kids themselves are educated and made aware of the risks involved with this game, the sooner we save a child.

Sarah A. Pacatte Gabriel's Mom

Gabriel Harry Mordecai 07-31-91~ 05-06-05