Friday, December 30, 2011

Phoenix | Intern ID'd who died in apparent suicide

Funeral services were held yesterday for Daniel Kemp, an Arizona State University journalism student and news intern at The Arizona Republic who killed himself Dec. 23 by jumping from the newspaper's parking garage.

Kemp
Born Dec. 8, 1991 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., Kemp "died much too young, at age 20, in downtown Phoenix,'' says his Republic obituary.

"During college," the obituary continues, "he served three internships with local newspapers, most recently with the Republic doing breaking news."

In its news story last week about Kemp's suicide, the paper didn't disclose he was one of the paper's interns, leading readers to wonder why he chose the downtown garage.

A comment posted on his obituary's guestbook says Kemp worked in the nearby Mesa bureau: "He read 100s of incident reports in Chandler, and managed to cull some wonderful stories, using his own news judgement, which later turned out to be some of the most read items on azcentral.com."

[Photo: Legacy]

8 comments:

  1. Suicide rates are highest among non-Hispanic whites and lowest among blacks, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Rates by race and ethnicity:

    Whites: 15.01

    American Indian/Alaska Native: 11.9

    Asian/Pacific Islander: 5.79

    Hispanics: 5.23

    Blacks: 5.2

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Still don't think your race statistics have anything to do with the item, but it's your blog.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't get why the race statistics are here either...then again, I never understand why they are included anywhere.

    ReplyDelete
  5. My J-school and my old internship. Very sad.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The downtown ASU campus is the epicenter for all things journalism. Its like two blocks from the j-school to the Republic. I myself have thought about jumping off the top of that garage many times because of the sorry state of our company.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.