By Rocco Parascandola and Josephine Stratman | New York Daily News
New York — An 11-year-old migrant boy from Venezuela hanged himself in an Upper West Side shelter following an argument with his parents, a police source said Tuesday.
Officers responding to a Monday evening 911 call found the child unconscious in the lobby of the Stratford Arms Hotel on W. 70th St. His parents had rushed him there looking for help after they found him sitting on the bedroom floor in their apartment, a shoelace tied around his neck and the bedpost, the source said.
Medics rushed the boy to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he died at 6 p.m.
Residents of the hotel, the site of a city-run shelter, told the Daily News they heard the mother’s screams after finding her child unconscious in the room.
Erlis Coronel lives on the same floor as the family. She said she’d only arrived recently in the shelter and didn’t know the family well, but saw them in passing in the hallways.
“Everyone was shocked, screaming, scared,” Coronel, 22, recounted.
“Everyone heard those screams,” she added. “That was when it happened. He went down and they brought him downstairs.”
There, she said, firefighters and police tried to save the boy’s life, but it was too late.
Coronel, from Venezuela, said she saw the boy earlier that day.
“I saw him at 2 o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. “I asked him, ‘You didn’t go to class today?’ And he said, ‘No, I didn’t have class, I don’t know why.’”
The boy was the family’s only child, according to Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side.
An official cause of death was not released as the investigation continues.
The argument between the 11-year-old and his parents was about a cell phone, according to the police source, who added that the child did not have his own device and wanted to use his parents’.
He grew despondent after they refused to let him use it and at some point retreated to the bedroom where he was later found, the sourced added.
“We were all appalled to see what happened to the boy,” said shelter resident Luis Sigcha, originally from Ecuador.
Sigcha, 48, said he saw shelter security rush to try to help the boy.
“The guard helped him, they got him down, but … he was unconscious, he no longer gave any signs of life,” he said.
On Tuesday, a wreath hung on the door of the hotel. At school dismissal time, groups of moms, nannies and children walked by the 10-story site, chatting and laughing.
But inside the hotel, the boy’s death has had a chilling effect on the residents. It’s also started to raise questions about access to mental health services for migrants.
Juan Sebastian, a father of two, can’t help but think of his own 11-year-old son. His boy and 14-year-old daughter have struggled with the transition ever since the family moved here two months ago, he said. Aside from the struggle to find consistent work, that’s been one of the toughest parts of moving to New York City, he said.
“This is something that, it worries you,” said Sebastian, 36. “It puts you on notice … I’m shocked. It’s something I can’t imagine as a parent. It’s scary.
“It needs to be a place where children can talk, they can walk freely, they can watch television,” he continued. “Things like televisions, they’re very important when you’re 11 years old.”
The city has sent social workers to the hotel to help both the family of the 11-year-old and other families, according to Brewer, but she said it’s not enough.
She wants to see more help for migrants in acclimating to life in the Big Apple.
More than 100,000 migrants have come to New York City in the past 18 months, with 67,000 of them remaining in its care. Thousands have fled political and economic instability to come here in hopes of building a better life — but without easy paths to obtaining work permits or stable housing, many have grown disheartened.
“It’s very painful,” Mayor Eric Adams said of the 11-year-old’s death at a Tuesday press conference. “It hurts a lot. You start to ask ‘Did you do enough, should we have done more?’ And we know we’ve done all we could possibly do with what we have. But it hurts a lot.”
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(New York Daily News staff writer Chris Sommerfeldt contributed to this story.)
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