An aspiring actor and model hanged himself on the monkey bars of a Brooklyn playground early yesterday morning – hours after hinting at his plans to friends on Facebook, police said.
Paul Zolezzi, 30, whose body was found in Mount Prospect Park yesterday, had achieved some success modeling. But he turned to heroin after he failed to achieve his dreams of fame and fortune, his mother, Stephanie, told The Post.
The cryptic suicide note, left in the form of his “status update” on the social-networking site, said only that he was “born in San Francisco, became a shooting star over everywhere, and ended his life in Brooklyn . . . And couldn’t have asked for more.”
When Zolezzi was 8, his father, Mark, threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge, his mother said.
“He had to grow up without a father,” said Stephanie Zolezzi, who volunteers on a suicide hot line at her church in Daly City, Calif. “That’s what is probably behind his problem.”
Two weeks ago, having been unhappy living in Portland, Ore., his friend Melissa Cafiero paid to fly him back to the metropolitan area, where he said he would stay with a friend in New Jersey.
He was getting methadone treatment and planning to return to an old job at Spirit Cruises, Cafiero said.
“He didn’t have the best start, and he really wanted more than anything to overcome all of that and to not be buried by issues of his childhood,” she said.
“But no matter how hard he tried to escape that, he suffered.”
Zolezzi, who left a note on his cellphone to call his mother, had a steady string of girlfriends over the years but was heartbroken after his breakup with his fiancée in Brooklyn several years ago, the mom said.
His short postings on Facebook depict the terrible lead-up to his suicide.
“Paul is wondering, what unspeakable act did I do in a previous life to deserve this one?” he posted in late January.
“Paul is going to be the first person ever to hang himself on the way out of Portland!” he wrote before moving back to New York. “Everything here sucks!”
Shortly after Zolezzi left his Facebook suicide note, a friend replied with a post that read: “Are you dying? or just staying brooklyn? I hope it’s the latter.”
Additional reporting by John Doyle