Posted on 03/19/2005 6:38:02 PM PST by jern
By SHARON COHEN, AP National Writer
He started reading as a toddler, played piano at age 3 and delivered a high school commencement speech in cap and gown when he was just 10 — his eyes barely visible over the podium.
Brandenn Bremmer was a child prodigy: He composed and recorded music, won piano competitions, breezed through college courses with an off-the-charts IQ and mastered everything from archery to photography, hurtling through life precociously. Then, last Tuesday, Brandenn was found dead in his Nebraska home from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head.
He was just 14. He left no note.
"Sometimes we wonder if maybe the physical, earthly world didn't offer him enough challenges and he felt it was time to move on and do something great," his mother, Patricia, said from the family home in Venango, Neb., a few miles from the Colorado border.
Brandenn showed no signs of depression, she said. He had just shown his family the art for the cover of his new CD that was about to be released.
He was, according to his family and teachers, an extraordinary blend of fun-loving child and serious adult. He loved Harry Potter (news - web sites) and Mozart. He watched cartoons and enjoyed video games but gave classical piano concerts for hundreds of people — without a hint of stage fright.
"He wasn't just talented, he was just a really nice young man," said David Wohl, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, where Brandenn studied music after high school. "He had an easy smile. He really was unpretentious."
Patricia Bremmer — who writes mysteries and has long raised dogs with her husband, Martin — said they both knew their son was special from the moment he was born. The brown-haired, blue-eyed boy was reading when he was 18 months old and entering classical piano competitions by age 4.
"He was born an adult," his mother said. "We just watched his body grow bigger."
He scored 178 on one IQ test — a test his mother said he was too bored to finish.
Brandenn was home schooled. By age 6, when many little boys are learning to read, he was ready to tackle high school. He enrolled in the Independent Study High School in Lincoln through the University of Nebraska, taking most of his courses by mail.
"He was such a breath of fresh air," recalls Lisa Bourlier, associate principal at the school. "It's unusual to find a student 6 years old willing to shake hands with adults and say, 'Hi, my name is Brandenn, this is what I want to do.'"
In a college preparatory program, Brandenn took his classes in clusters — all science at one time, all social studies at another — and "zipped through," said Bourlier.
His mother said his mind was so facile that if a topic interested him, he could complete a semester's work in 10 days. She sometimes worried she couldn't keep pace with her son's intellect, and the family hired tutors.
"He set the pace," she said. "We only did what he wanted. (We might say) 'Instead of taking three classes, why don't you take one?' We let him make his own choices from the time he was an infant. ... He always made good choices."
For his senior class photo, Brandenn temporarily darkened his hair, wore a red cape and round wire-rimmed glasses and posed with a suspended broom — the spitting image of Harry Potter.
At age 10, he became the youngest graduate of his high school and he delivered a commencement speech, saying he was so unusual he practically "qualified for the endangered species list."
"He carried himself very well," recalled Bourlier. "He did just a very nice job for being 10. During the ceremony, he gave this excellent little speech. He was just so composed. ... Then afterward, he was running around with his nieces and nephews just a few years younger than him."
Brandenn was taking biology at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, Neb., and had recently decided he wanted to become an anesthesiologist. He also studied for years at Colorado State, polishing piano skills that had won him state competitions and a table-full of trophies.
Brandenn turned away from his classical roots and started writing his own spiritual, New Age-style music, passing on a demo of one piano piece to the musician Yanni at a Nebraska concert. He released a CD called "Elements" and gave concerts in Colorado and Nebraska. He was booked for a concert in Kansas next year.
His music will live on — the Bremmers plan to release his second CD for fans who range from nuns to cancer patients to the owners of a New York restaurant where diners can listen to the soothing melodies of Brandenn Bremmer.
His family, meanwhile, wonders why he is gone.
"We're trying to rationalize now," his mother 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" to save others.
And so, she said, Brandenn's kidneys were donated to two people, his liver went to a 22-month-old and his heart to an 11-year-old boy.
Patricia Bremmer said in the days since her son's death, she and others have felt his presence. Her husband, she said, was comforted to find a message under his computer mouse pad their son had written six years ago: "I love you dad. No matter what happens, I'll always love you."
She wished that she, too, could have that sort of solace. She started rummaging through drawers to stay busy and came across five handmade cards from Brandenn with the same loving message.
Finding them, she said, "just made it so much easier."
..this plane of existence wasn't challenging enough, I guess. :^/
Maybe he just wanted to be a normal kid.
Wow, that is just sad. Not leaving a note seems strange, couldn't it have been an accident?
That's what I think. I think he was playing around with the gun and it more than likely went off.
To bad, we could have used a guy like him on our team.
The 'suicide solution' suddenly seems trendy ^
Posted by beaversmom
On News/Activism ^ 03/09/2005 5:24:46 AM PST · 21 replies · 975+ views
Yahoo News ^ | March 8, 2005 | Michael Medved
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1359104/posts
Nothing ominous about this? And what about mom? Don't we love her too?
There's more here than this article tells. Tragedy, at the least.
Are you sure?
being smart doesn't make you mature or help you understand your feelings
Prayers for the parents. God that must be hard.
You betcha. The parents had too much invested in expectations.
You think he was contemplating suicide 6 years ago, when he was 4 years old?
I realize these parents are suffering from the loss of their child, but the quote above could be said by any parent that has lost a child, either by death or incarceration. Childhood is a vital part of being a person. This child needed to experience childhood and it was the parents' job to provide it. Obviously he did not make good choices. It was not his responsibility to make choices, that was his parents' responisbility alone. No matter how much his mind absorbed, he was too immature emotionally to make choices about his own life. So he made the ultimate choice.
If I get flamed, so be it. Children need to be children. They can be exceptional children (I had one) and still be children. He could never fit into the world his parents *allowed* him to create. Everyone was older and dating and smoking driving. If he was so smart at 10, he would have been just as smart at 21, when he was more mature to make decisions about his life. Instead at 6 years old the parents put the reponsibility on him, instead of being parents and allowing him to be a child.
My impression is that these kinds of parents just want the brag about producing this kind of child. The same reason Patsy Ramsey put her beautiful young daughter on stage, which costs that child's life too. Children are not trinkets. They are children. They need to experience being children, just like us normal folk did.
Maybe, but I don't think so. I think that he just couldn't figure out a reason to live, and, if so, I understand the problem. And, he found no solutions in his spiritual, New Age religion substitute. I just wish that he could have known Christ. "Love one another, as I have loved you." Love is the only answer, and we've cracked the nut of life when it finally dawns on us that it's all about the love we give, not the love we receive.
The real tragedy here, I think, is that this boy's intellectual development so far out-paced his emotional and physical development that he never had a clue about the great joys that lay ahead for him. And, unfortunately, there was no one around who truly understood and could explain it all.
IQ tests were made to determine learning disabilities not how "smart" someone is. There is no such thing as being "smarter" than someone else. There is just knowing some information that someone else doesn`t or being practiced enough to solve problems faster than someone else. You get these idiots who completely abuse this IQ test like Mensa and this child prodigy crap when the truth of the matter is everyone is born with different interests just like everyone has a different personality.
Someone may be born with an interest in science or math then you get the ones who are interested in just plain old learning. They just like to learn everything and these types of people are constantly proclaimed as "prodigys" when they are not, they are just like everyone else. Einstein was considered retarded when he was a kid, probably like most other shy kids are at one point, but he had a great interest in physics and math and he worked at it constantly. Mozart had a great interest in music and like kids learn languages very fast he learned music very fast when he was a kid. Why? Because he had a great interest in it.
Everybody has an interest in something, and if you constantly work at it, you will get to a point where people will be blown away by it. The true prodigys are the ones who in fact have brain damage like the autistic savants, or schitzophrenics like John Nash or Ted Kazinski, not a kid who has a normal brain. I get so sick hearing about these kids when the fact of the matter is they are just kids who are very interested in learning, nothing more nothing less. I mean a kid who is obsessed with toys, why isn`t he called a "toy prodigy"? They limit only these kids who like to learn to this prodigy classification and the kid is put under tremendous pressure to keep up this prodigy facade which is why a lot of them either blow their brains out or go crazy. I find it no coincedence that just about every year I hear about an Asian committing suicide by jumping from the roof at NYU. These kids are put under tremendous pressure by their parents to be "a prodigy" and they get sick of it.
Although Brandenn was beyond a brilliant child, I'm not sure letting such a young child make "his own choices" was all that prudent.
6 years ago he was 8. The kid was probably miserable from day one. The parents aren't to blame, it doesn't sound like they pushed him in a direction other than what he chose for himself.
He was 14 when it happened; he wrote that note when he was eight. Old enough, for someone like that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.