The first I will cover in this posting and is the excellent website snopes.com. You can see the entry relating to this tragic incident here.
Whenever I hear something which I think cannot be true, I check it on Snopes. And more often than not the story is identified on the site as an "urban legend".
On the site you can research fascinating stories such as these:
There are alligators in the sewers under New York
You might wake up in an ice-filled bath some day with your kidneys missing
My favourite story from the site relates to a story which I was told by a friend who assured me that it was true ("happened to a friend of a friend"). This is the story that kids are kidnapped from shops by people who alter their appearance in some way. Thanks to Snopes I know that this story is not true.