Business

Rash of finance-pro suicides baffles experts

The financial world has been rattled by a rash of apparent suicides, with some of the best and brightest among the finance workers who have taken their lives since the start of the year.

A majority of the eight suicides of 2014 have been very public demonstrations, which has suicide-prevention experts puzzled.

“Jumping is much less common as a method for suicide in general, so I am struck by the number that have occurred in recent months in this industry,” said Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Moutier also discounts the location of the act as being the driver behind the reason for the suicide.

“The suicide-research literature doesn’t help very much with the question of why the method of these suicides is so out in the open,” she added.

MARCH 12: Kenneth Bellando, 28, an investment banker at Levy Capital, was found dead on the sidewalk outside his building on Manhattan’s East Side, after allegedly jumping from the sixth-story roof, sources said.

MARCH 11: Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, jumped in front of an LIRR train near the Syosset, NY, train station.

FEB. 28:  Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta, a cyber-currency exchange firm, was found dead outside her Singapore apartment. The 28-year-old American jumped from a 25-story building, authorities said.

FEB. 18: Li Junjie, a 33-year-old JPMorgan finance pro, leaped to his death from the roof of the company’s 30-story Hong Kong office tower, authorities said.

 FEB. 3: Ryan Henry Crane, 37, a JPMorgan executive director who worked in New York, was found dead inside his Stamford, Conn., home. A cause of death in Crane’s case has yet to be determined as authorities await a toxicology report, a spokesperson for the Stamford Police Department said.

JAN. 31: Mike Dueker, 50, chief economist at Russell Investments and a former Federal Reserve bank economist, was found dead at the side of a road that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state after jumping a fence and falling down an embankment, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.

 JAN. 28: Gabriel Magee, 39, a vice president with JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank technology arm in the UK, jumped to his death from the roof of the bank’s 33-story Canary Wharf tower in London.

JAN. 26: William Broeksmit, 58, a former senior risk manager at Deutsche Bank, was found hanged in a house in South Kensington, according to London police.