The city medical examiner’s office determined last week that a Stuyvesant High School student from Bayside died from bacterial meningitis, a spokeswoman for the city Health Department said.
Ava Hecht, 17, who lived in Bayside and attended Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan, was found dead in her home Jan. 8. She was buried in Cedar Park Cemetery in New Jersey following a funeral service at Sinai Chapel in Fresh Meadows earlier this month.
On Jan. 17, the city medical examiner found that Hecht died of bacterial meningitis, a Health Department spokeswoman said. Another Stuyvesant student was taken to a Manhattan hospital last week after exhibiting signs of meningitis, but test results concluded that he had not contracted the illness, the spokeswoman said.
A Facebook page, titled “In Loving Memory of Ava Hecht,” has been created online. Listed on the page is a tribute to Hecht called Project Ava, which asks for people to write “From Ava” in the upper lefthand corner of $1 bills and hand them out to the homeless or subway artists.
Symptoms of meningitis, which kills an estimated 10 percent of people who contract it, include fever, chills, stiff neck, headache, rash, nausea or vomiting.
— Nathan Duke
