Adolescence is gripping, beautiful … propaganda

Published April 4, 2025 12:05am ET



One Sunday morning in October 2007, I woke up without having seen someone brutally stabbed for the last time. I was 16, and along with a few other friends, I had stayed over at my friend Peter’s house in east Midtown Manhattan. Peter’s father took us all out for breakfast at a diner on nearby 2nd Avenue and 35th Street, and as the scrambled eggs showed up, there was a commotion outside. Thirty-eight-year-old Lee Coleman, schizophrenic and bipolar, was on top of psychologist Susan Barron, 67, who had the leash of her small dog around her wrist. He was stabbing away, methodically plunging one of four kitchen knives into her all over, and then putting one knife down and switching to another. 

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