Brandenn bremer biography of martin
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Parents struggle with loss of 'child prodigy'
by Joe Duggan, Lincoln Journal Star
Originally published March 18, 2005
Brandenn Bremmer, a 14-year-old Venango boy who was gifted in music and graduated high school only four years ago, apparently has committed suicide. Brandenn was found Tuesday in his home with a gunshot wound to the head, leaving his parents trying to cope with unimaginable loss.
Past stories about Brandenn: March 8, 1998 | May 27, 2001 | June 16, 2001
The mother can still feel her son's heartbeat. Every day she placed her hand on his chest, feeling the internal rhythm of the boy she brought into the world.
The boy with the blue eyes and brown curls who could read when he was 2. The prodigy with the super genius IQ who graduated from a correspondence high school program at the age of 10. The young man who loved to compose, record and perform piano music. Now she places her hand on a picture of Brandenn Bremmer because that's all she has at the moment.
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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 w
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Beverly Dismukes, a kindly woman in North Platte who taught Brandenn music theory and gave him piano lessons for two years, said that, despite what his parents thought, she didn’t consider him one of her musical prodigies. “But you could play something once, and he would play it back to you—that’s unusual,” she said. “He was begåvad in that he could do that.” On a “fact sheet” that Patti and Martin had printed and distributed to the media, they listed, along with Brandenn’s high-school grade-point average of 3.8, the items “His music has made it to Japan”; “Writes a song sometimes in less than an hour”; and “He holds all of his music in his head, never writes it out.”
“He was what they call globally gifted: intellectually, physically, emotionally, musically,” Martin said. “Mozart had his mathematicality going, and Brandenn’s talent was more on the emotional, spiritual side of the music.” He said he had always assumed that when Brandenn was in his twenties and thirties someone might