About Ulysses Stable

It has been a week since 12-year-old Ulysses Stable is alleged to have been killed by his father, Jose Stable. In an effort to get a sense of who Ulysses was, or of how those who lived among him in the Bronx perceived of him, I have compiled quotations from neighbors interviewed in various news stories that appeared last week.

“It’s hard to celebrate Thanksgiving when you know your kids are fine and something like this happened to someone so close by,” said Louise Cassetta, 41. Julie, her 20-year-old daughter, lives with her children three floors below the Stables in the building.

Neighbors said Ulysses, who weighed about 280 pounds, and his father seemed inseparable. The father was always correcting his son, many said, pulling his hands away from people as he tried to grab them or keeping him from darting away. Ulysses rarely spoke but moaned or screamed and had a habit of eating grass, neighbors said.

Ms. Cassetta told of a recent incident when she was on the elevator with Ulysses and his father. “What is really vivid in my mind is I was in the elevator and the boy was trying to touch me in an agitated way, not in a friendly way,” she said. “He was bothered. The father kept pushing him against the elevator wall. He did it over and over. The boy was mumbling; he didn’t really have a vocabulary.”

She added of the father: “I could just feel the anger in him. I could sense the anger.” (New York Times, 23 Nov 06)

Wednesday, neighbors said father and son were always together, that Ulysses doesn’t speak, that he’s physically aggressive and greets people sometimes too enthusiastically.

Controlling the boy’s behavior was difficult for Stable and the situation affected his personality, neighbors said.

“The son was out of control most of the time,” said Julie Cassetta, 20, who lives three floors below the Stables.

Cassetta said she knows the father through her job as a receptionist for the building’s management company and that he’s impatient and prone to outbursts.

Cassetta’s mother, Louise, 41, who baby-sits for her daughter’s children in the building, recalled an incident in an elevator when the boy aggressively greeted her, making physical contact. The father reacted by banging the boy against the elevator wall several times, she said. “I could feel the anger and sense the anger from him,” Louise Cassetta said. (Newsday.com, 22 Nov 06)

Earlier this month, Stable asked neighbor Awilda Soto, 60, to take Ulysses off his hands, she said. “I can barely take care of myself,” Soto explained. “There are places he could have sent him. I guess he couldn’t take it anymore.”

Police records show cops had previously gone to Stable’s home to investigate domestic disputes. But police and neighbors said the past arguments were between Stable and his mom, who moved out several years ago.

“The son would always come and shake my hand,” neighbor Eldridge Ames, 48, said of Ulysses. “He was harmless.” (New York Post, 23 Nov 06)

Let us not forget Ulysses.