Omotayo Adeoye, 17, a student at the Harlem High School for Math, Science and Engineering, committed suicide after she was caught cheating on a test during class, reports the New York Post.
After teacher Eva Malikova discovered Adeoye cheating on a German exam by peeking at her cell phone, she allegedly snatched the device away and screamed, “Oh, you shouldn’t be cheating! You guys shouldn’t be cheating! You guys are lying to yourselves!”
Adeoye burst into tears, saying “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
“Oh, you are not really sorry,” Malikova said angrily. “That’s not a sincere apology!”
After that exchange, Adeoye wrote on her exam, “I just want to go away forever on the bottom of the river,” then asked to be excused to go to the bathroom.
Instead of going to the bathroom, the teen left campus, walked to the Hudson River, left her ID on a rock and jumped into the water.
Shocked bystanders shouted at Adeoye to come out of the water but she waded in deeper and reportedly appeared to force herself under.
“I said, ‘Come here, come here, don’t go to the water,’ ”said 71-year-old fisherman Fabio Martinez. “She was just crying, crying all the time.”
Though Adeoye’s actions may seem extreme, the teen had reportedly been suffering with depression.
[Adeoye] had run away from home repeatedly in the past two years, friends, fellow students and others who knew her told The Post.
“Her family was very worried. They found her walking near the river in Manhattan [last year],” said Pedro Jimenez, the superintendent at Adeoye’s Mott Haven apartment building.
One neighbor, Manzel Jones, 44, said the girl never seemed to socialize.
“It’s either she was going to school, doing the laundry or playing basketball in the park by herself,” Jones recalled.
“She walked with her head down. She wouldn’t look at you, never made eye contact. She seemed stressed all the time.”
