ShareThisIt's happened again: another young life lost to a stunt that kids call the "choking game" but is no more a game than Russian roulette.
Sixteen-year-old Justin Butler was a fun-loving, football-playing high school student in Nevada County, Calif.
On a Sunday earlier this month, alone in a room, Justin leaned his neck into a strap attached to a piece of exercise equipment and pressed hard enough to constrict the circulation of oxygen and blood to his brain, family members say. The self- inflicted choking can make kids high -- sometimes unconscious.
It killed Justin.
In 2007, a variation of the game killed Folsom, Calif., teen Andre Anderson, 16. In 2005, Gabe Mordecai, 13, of Paradise, Calif., died playing the choking game.
Though a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 82 probable choking-game deaths among 6- to 19-year-olds from 1995 to 2007, experts blame the game for an estimated 100 to 150 child and adolescent deaths nationwide each year.
Authorities say that for generations, kids have been choking each other or using a noose to choke themselves and get a brief high. With each death comes another call for increased awareness and education.
"It seems that kids are getting the message of 'don't do drugs,' 'drinking is bad' and they're looking for alternatives, which is leading (the choking game) to be less underground than it has been," said Kate Leonardi, executive director of the DB Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit organization focused on risky adolescent behaviors.
Though the choking game is fraught with risk, children tend to think of it as recreation, not an activity linked to fatalities. One study in the Journal of Injury Prevention found that 40 percent of children surveyed didn't associate the behavior with any risk.
While 75 percent of youths know about the choking game, only 25 percent of parents do, said Leonardi, calling it "a devastating gap of information."
"All those things that as parents we think about and talk to our kids about, this wasn't even on our radar," said Justin's father, Eric Butler.
Justin had scored the only touchdown for Bear River High School's varsity football team during its Sept. 17 game. Two days later, on a Sunday, Justin choked himself. Emergency crews were called to the home just after 6 p.m. A helicopter flew Butler to UC David Medical Center, where he died at 12:17 a.m. Monday.
His death has been classified as an accident.
Gabe Mordecai's mother was in another room just 5 feet from her son when he played the choking game in their Paradise, Calif., apartment. It was "my ignorance and my son's sense of high-risk adventure that killed him," Sarah Pacatte said.
She had tried to talk to her twin sons about the choking game after catching them talking about it one day. She said she made them promise to not do it anymore. But she didn't know to talk to them about the dangers of asphyxia.
"If parents and others don't make children aware of this before their peers do, and arm them with factual information, the kids will buy the lies and we'll keep losing children," Pacatte said.
The risks aren't limited to death, said Dr. Thomas Andrew, chief medical examiner for New Hampshire and an expert on the choking game.
"Any time you're inducing anoxic injury to the brain -- robbing the brain of oxygen -- you're introducing the risk of cognitive and learning disorders," he said, adding that visual defects and chronic headaches also are potential side effects.
The choking game is different from autoerotic asphyxiation, which includes a distinct sexual gratification component.
Of the fatalities linked to the choking game, an overwhelming majority -- about 87 percent -- are boys, Andrew said. Nearly all children who died were playing the game alone and using ligatures.
Parents need to start talking to their children about the game's dangers, Andrew said.
"Why would (you) have the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll talk and not include this?" he asked.
Eric Butler doesn't want one more family to lose a child to the choking game, he says. "If I can help people avoid the same tragedy, so be it."
(Contact Sacramento Bee reporter Niesha Lofing at nlofing(at)sacbee.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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