Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Child prodigy

(From March 18, 2005)  A musical prodigy who completed high school at age 10 apparently killed himself at 14, authorities said.

Brandenn E. Bremmer, who taught himself how to read at 18 months and began playing the piano at 3, was found dead Tuesday at his home in southwest Nebraska with a gunshot wound to the head, sheriff's officials said.

Patricia Bremmer said her son showed no signs of depression, had just finished the art for the cover of a second CD of his music, and had plans for Wednesday. She did not disclose details of how he was found.

"We're rationalizing now," she said. "He had this excessive need to help people and teach people. ... He was so connected with the spiritual world, we felt he could hear people's needs and desires and their cries. We just felt like something touched him that day and he knew he had to leave" so his organs could be donated.

She said Brandenn's kidneys went to two people, his liver to a 22-month old and his heart to an 11-year-old boy.

Brandenn had decided in December he wanted to be an anesthesiologist, his mother said. He started taking a biology class at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, where he had also taken courses in 2001. She said he had planned to eventually attend the University of Nebraska.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-prodigy-14-commits-suicide/

His death left them shaken, saying they wondered about the struggle of any life with a foot in each of the two worlds that Brandenn inhabited -- a child, but because of his brilliance, not really a child at all.
 
"He really to me seemed no different than any other normal kid growing up, but yet you still knew that he was different," said Steven Tucker, a farmer who lives not far from the Bremmer family in Venango, Neb.
 
Brandenn's mother, Patti, who found him shot when she and her husband, Martin, returned home from grocery shopping on Tuesday evening, said that Brandenn, who started college at 11, had been different, to be sure. But he had never been depressed, lonely or pressured to achieve.
 
"So many people will want to say he was maladjusted or not socially adjusted, but that's just not so at all," Ms. Bremmer said in a telephone interview. "It makes me mad. People need to understand. These kids are so much more intelligent than they are."
 
"We never pushed Brandenn. He made his own choices. He taught himself to read. If anything, we tried to hold him back a little."
 
Brandenn left no note, no goodbye. He had seemed cheery earlier in the day, before she left for the store, Ms. Bremmer said. She said he was busy with preparations to become an anesthesiologist, with his friends and with plans for the imminent release of a second CD of music he had composed, in the style, somewhat, of Yanni....
 
He could act like an adult one moment and like a child the next, said Jim Schiefelbein, former principal of University of Nebraska-Lincoln Independent Study High School, which Brandenn started attending at age 6 and finished four years later. Mr. Schiefelbein recalled how at his graduation, Brandenn, then 10, offered a few words of thanks, spoke to the news media and promptly began running around the room with other children at the ceremony...
 
Brandenn sat in on physics classes, surrounded by college students, but then participated, as well, in helping younger children who were closer to his age. He was able to play and have fun, Mr. Jones said, but then return the next day and work on his research projects alongside people 10 years his senior.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/19/us/one-shot-ends-the-life-of-a-prodigy-who-appeared-to-be-ordinary.html?_r=2

1 comment:

  1. The kid looks like any 7-year-old. He bounces through the house with unlimited energy. He wears jeans, a comfy shirt and has tousled brown hair. His cheeks and nose are splayed with freckles from summer afternoons spent under the western Nebraska sun.

    But there are signs that Brandenn Bremmer isn't like other kids his age. In his upstairs bedroom, a Batman and Robin spread covers his bed. But on the wall — where you might expect to see a Michael Jordan poster — hangs a periodic table of the elements.

    His warm forwardness disarms adults because it's unexpected coming from someone so young. His impeccable diction — his voice caresses every word as if he were reading from the pronunciation guides in Webster's — enhances his broad vocabulary.

    Then there's the way his bright, blue eyes cloud — with frustration, anger, maybe sorrow — when an adult talks down to him the way adults do when they're talking to a 7-year-old boy.

    "He's just like another adult living with us," says his mother, Patti Bremmer.

    Martin Bremmer explains his son another way. "He's an adult with a boy's experience."...

    It has been 5 years since Brandenn correctly identified those magnetic letters. Martin and Patti Bremmer, who knew nothing about gifted education, are practically experts now.

    The jargon of high-intelligence learning and conceptual thinking rolls off their tongues as easily as bushels per acre. With the courage and confidence any parents display when trying to do what's best for their child, they have undertaken a huge task.

    They're using a high school curriculum developed by the Distance Learning Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It's possible that Brandenn will have his high school diploma in two years.

    What's he supposed to do then? Blow out the nine candles on his birthday cake and head to Harvard? "How many years do I have before he's off?" Patti Bremmer asks.

    At his mother's request, Brandenn pulls himself from the computer. He answers a few more questions, then he bolts for the stairs to his bedroom.

    It's as if his body mimics the speed of the synapses firing in his head. He returns with a laser gun game. Soon the house is filled with phaser zaps and electronic explosions.

    He careens from behind doorways and lands with a thud on the floor as he jumps to avoid an opponent's shot. Pandemonium reigns.

    Kid genius? Yeah, but at this moment, he's just a kid.

    http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/family_adapts.htm

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