01-06-2025
Teen posted Instagram farewell before leaping from Staten Island Ferry: family
A 17-year-old high school senior left a goodbye note on Instagram and said farewell to his friends via group text before jumping off the Staten Island Ferry, his distraught sister said Sunday.
The NYPD has been searching the waters of New York harbor for Brandon Pino since he jumped about 9:45 a.m. on Saturday as the ferry approached the southern tip of Manhattan, cops said.
Brandon's sister Cathleen Pino reached out to the Daily News because her family hopes public attention will lead to her sibling's recovery.
'We're doing our own search with family members. We are going along Jersey City, Battery Park, Brooklyn, just looking around the borders,' said Cathleen, adding that she hasn't gotten any updates from authorities. 'We've gone on Governors Island yesterday and we're doing it again today.'
Brandon, a senior at Gaynor McCown Expeditionary Learning School on Staten Island, went to his uncle's house on Staten Island about 7 a.m. on Saturday, then headed for the 9:30 a.m. boat from the St. George Ferry Terminal, not telling anyone, his sister said.
'He had posted on his Instagram,' she said. 'It was saying, 'My last day on Earth.' And then he also made a post about mental health awareness. Hashtag mental health awareness,' his sister said.
He was texting a group of friends, who started getting increasingly worried, just before he jumped overboard, she said. A witness notified the ferry crew after it docked in Manhattan, she said.
Police searched the waters, but called off the search at about 6 p.m., the sister said.
Brandon lived with his mom and two older sisters in Port Richmond, and his nieces and nephews looked up to him because of his commitment to fitness.
'His friends told me that they had seen that he was more happy than usual at school lately,' Cathleen said. 'And it seems very odd because he was being himself, which was eating, cooking for himself, cooking his healthy food, going to the gym, going to school early, being there for his graduation practice.'
Still, she said, his friends said he'd express worries about his body, 'to be a certain weight or look a specific way.'
One of his classmates had recently died by suicide, she added.
'We want help to see if there can be more attention, so to see if they can actually do at least a recovery, for my mom to get some type of closure, so she can bury her son,' she said.
