PITTSBURGH — Police said the death of a 19-year-old Carnegie Mellon University student at a campus building is under investigation but likely was a suicide.

Fellow students are grieving for the young man who police said jumped down several flights of stairs Thursday at Wean Hall, home of the computer science, physics and math departments.

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“I was trying to get to class,” said student Xing Zhou. “I had to go down two floors and I went to the stairwell that I usually go to and it’s roped off. I went down two different levels and they were roped off completely.”

Pittsburgh police said an apparent suicide note was found near the student’s body.”

He was really nice, easy-going, kind, generous, always helping,” junior Matt Belenki said. “He was a really smart kid.”

In an eerie coincidence, words written long ago on each floor in the Wean Hall stairwell come together to form a poem:
“If you’re feeling like a jerk
cause your project just won’t work
go ahead and take a leap
then you’ll finally get some sleep.”

The saying is attributed to a takeoff of a jingle in an old Burma-Shave ad.

Over the years, the high, spiraling structure was sometimes known as “Architects’ Leap” among students. There’s even a Web page with photos of the staircase and the poem.

Some students have wondered if those words influenced Thursday’s jumper.

“I don’t think reading a poem will compel anybody to go to such a drastic measure,” said graduate student Eric Hsu.

“It’s really hard to say. It’s difficult to say. I hope not,” said graduate student Eleanor Zimmermann. “It could have. I guess if you’re going to do it somewhere, I guess that’s the place to do it.”

“I don’t think the poem is particularly appropriate,” said graduate student Reva Street.

“People should consult their friends and peers that they’re feeling so pressurized,” freshman Deb Biswas said. “This kind of … it’s just the beginning of the school year.”

CMU state senate member Natalie Morris said the university has a program called CAPS that helps students deal with personal and academic issues like family problems, stress or concerns about the future.
She urged grieving students to reach out to the program if they feel they can’t go on.

“I couldn’t even begin to process it,” Morris said about Thursday’s death. “I think it’s important that everyone feels they have a support system.”Anyone feeling suicidal is urged to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK.

In a written statement Friday, CMU spokesman Ken Walters said, “We have on occasion cleaned up things that students have thrown down this stairwell — paint, books, paper, food and the like. There was a chalk outline of a body years ago, not recently, but it was removed. It was also a site for graffiti, which has also been removed. It would be impossible to know where a student using a term such as Architect’s Leap would come from, other than the fact that it is a high, eight-story staircase, as no one has ever previously been injured in the stairwell, to our knowledge.”