The Final Leap (12 page)

Identifying a body isn't as simple as one might think. In the first place, many people jump with no identification on them. They leave their wallet or purse on the bridge or in their car. Second, a person's absence may not be noticed and a missing persons report most likely has not been filed yet so investigators don't have a lot to go on. Third, bodies disintegrate the longer they're in seawater. Only pieces of a body may be found, and then sometimes a considerable distance from the bridge. If the cavity is breached, then the gases that are caused by decay, which normally keep a body afloat, leak out and the body sinks. The result is that the person's remains probably never will be recovered, meaning that no autopsy can be conducted and no one will know with certainty what happened.

A recent success was the identification of a woman whose body washed up on Angel Island after being in the water two to three weeks. Because water softens the skin, there were no fingerprints and no facial features. (“Soft things are eaten,” Holmes says.) She was five-foot-two, 110 to 120 pounds. Her lungs were lacerated, her ribs were broken, there was extensive bruising, and her skull was fractured, indicating that she fell from a great height and probably landed on her head. The coroner's office issued a “found unidentified report,” which is the opposite of a missing person's report. It notes that a body has been found with no identification. People who are looking for a missing person go through these reports, of which there are thousands, to see if there's a match. In this case, a private investigator in Los Angeles contacted the Marin County coroner's office. He was searching for a woman meeting that general description who had eight siblings, including sisters in Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco. The woman told her family that she was going to live with her sister in San Jose, but never showed up. That's when the family hired the private investigator. The coroner asked the sisters to send photos of their sister, particularly photos that showed jewelry she was wearing. The body that was found had unusual jewelry—three-hoop interlocking earrings, matching rings and necklaces, and a bracelet with tiny skulls. Dental records wouldn't help because the deceased had had considerable dental work done in recent years, and there was no possibility of using DNA (even though the coroner could collect DNA from the body, there was nothing to compare it to—no hair follicles on a brush or saliva on a toothpaste). In the photos that Holmes's office received, the woman was wearing the exact same jewelry. When the investigator asked if the deceased always wore this jewelry, her sisters replied that she never took it off. A positive identification was established in only five weeks. When asked, one sister said that her sibling was depressed. Unless stronger evidence turns up, however, this death won't be attributed to the bridge.

Once a victim is identified, investigators attempt to determine his or her next of kin. This is done by searching marriage records and other public documents. If the victim lived in an apartment, the landlord is asked whether the person provided emergency contact information. If the person's employer is identified, emergency contact information is requested from the human resources department.

Contacting next of kin is the hardest part of the job. “Death notifications are the most difficult, most heart wrenching, most heartbreaking thing we do,” Holmes says. “We change somebody's life forever. We ruin some part of it.” Whenever possible, notification is done in person. As bad as it is to be told that a loved one has died, it's worse to receive the information over the phone. Even if the family member lives in another state, Holmes and his staff make arrangements for the person to be told face-to-face. “If next of kin live in Tuscaloosa,” Holmes tells me, “we contact the police department there, ask them to contact the individual in person, tell them that Joe has passed away in Marin County, and give them our number. We also ask officers to wait with the person until he or she calls us. We advise the police officer to suggest to the person that they go get a neighbor or contact their pastor, too—anything so that they're not alone.”

When the person calls, Holmes and his staff give the truth as softly as possible. Their aim is to be factual, but not sound bureaucratic. “It appears that Joe has taken his own life. He was found floating in water underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. People saw him climb over the rail and jump.” If there's a note and it's addressed to a specific individual, the coroner shares the contents only with that person or with someone the person authorizes. If it's a general note, along the lines of “Good-bye world,” then it's shared with next of kin.

Through experience, coroner's investigators have learned not to answer a deceased person's phone if it rings after they have taken possession of it. It might be the person's parent or spouse, and lead to questions. “This is Joe's mother. Who are you? Why are you answering my son's phone?” Then the investigator has to explain what happened, a situation that Holmes tries to avoid until it can be done in person.

Marin County doesn't have a morgue. A “body removal” company picks up the deceased in a van and delivers the remains, on a rotating basis, to one of three mortuaries. At the mortuary, a pathologist performs the autopsy. Everyone—transport company, mortuary, and pathologist—is on contract with the Marin County coroner's office.

Determining the cause of death tends to be relatively straightforward. There's a checklist that medical examiners go though. While there may not be much visible external damage for a bridge jump—just scrapes where the Coast Guard pulled the body from the water or large, purple bruises covering areas that took the brunt of the impact—invariably there's massive internal bleeding that's consistent with falling from a great height. Still, the body is checked for signs of foul play—just in case—as well as for needle marks and evidence of drug use, which may be important factors. If there's a suicide note or the jump was witnessed either by people on the bridge or by bridge cameras, then suicide as the cause of death is fairly obvious. Without a note and without witnesses, however, a ruling of suicide is speculative. In general, the higher the fall the greater the trauma to the body and the more likely that suicide is the cause. Fatal falls that are caused by accidents and homicide tend to be from lower heights.

It's common for family members to pressure coroners not to rule questionable deaths as suicides, primarily because of the shame associated with it but also because it may result in the denial of a life insurance claim. If a person is determined to have died by suicide within two years of a policy becoming effective, payment can be contested (beyond two years, life insurance is paid regardless of how the person died). In the absence of compelling evidence, a coroner may conclude that death occurred from a fall and leave it at that, not assessing whether it was a suicide and not connecting the death to the bridge at all.

The San Francisco coroner doesn't have a category for bridge jumps, only “falls from great heights,” according to Holmes, which can be from a bridge, tall building, or cliff. Holmes believes that this is deliberate, based on pressure from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Because of “pattern injuries,” Holmes says, the chief medical examiner can tell whether the person jumped from the bridge, but by not classifying it that way there's no recorded connection.

The word
autopsy
means “see for yourself.” Following a loved one's death, the family can ask the hospital to perform an autopsy. In cases where the cause of death is unknown or there's reason to believe that it could be homicide, suicide, or an accident, autopsies are required by law and don't require the consent of family members. Such is the case with Golden Gate Bridge jumpers.

The coroner's office receives the body of a bridge jumper in a body bag. A new bag is used for each person so that only evidence pertaining to that individual is contained in the bag. Before the body is removed from the bag, the investigator examines it. Usually, it's easy to tell if a jumper drowned—there's bubbly mucus coming out of the person's nose (in addition, water is found in the lungs during the autopsy). The investigator also looks for visible signs of trauma, such as deep or massive bruising, and the condition of clothing, which may be shredded or lost on impact.

After the initial assessment, the pathologist removes the body from the body bag and conducts an external examination. The deceased's gender, ethnicity, age, hair color, eye color, and other distinguishing characteristics such as birthmarks, moles, and old scar tissue are recorded. Following this, the body is undressed, cleaned up, weighed, and measured, and any visible wounds are analyzed as potential clues in the person's death. Next comes the internal examination; this is where the impact of death due to multiple blunt-force injuries is most visible. When someone jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge, regardless of the angle that the person hits the water, ribs are fractured and organs are lacerated.

Coroners recognize how different their relationship is to the deceased than that of other people. They never knew the person while he or she was alive; they only know the person after death. It's to the credit of Holmes and his staff that they make an effort to glean information from family members about what the person was like, as well as refer loved ones to grief counseling and other services.

Shortly after Casey Brooks jumped, for example, a community forum was held at Redwood High School—Casey's school—to talk about teen suicide. Holmes attended and stayed in the back of the room, silently observing. Half the people who attended were parents and half were students. He noticed a couple sitting near the front of the room, to his left. The man asked several matter-of-fact questions in a flat voice while the woman cried continuously. Afterward, Holmes approached them, introduced himself as the coroner of Marin County, and said that judging by their emotions they must have lost someone recently. It was John and Erika Brooks. Holmes has remained in close contact with them ever since; in fact, he e-mails Erika every few weeks to check in with her.

I asked Holmes what it is about Golden Gate Bridge suicides that resonate so strongly with him. He replied that it's the fact that they can be prevented: “I've never been an advocate before, but I'm an advocate about this [the suicide barrier]. Bridge District officials have to stop pretending that suicides are not happening.”

Holmes isn't one to mince words, and when he testified before the Bridge District board he was direct. “There are 25 to 30 confirmed suicides per year,” he told board members, “another 6 to 12 that aren't confirmed, and 80 people are taken off the bridge before they jump. That's 120 people per year planning to kill themselves by jumping off the bridge—not an insignificant number. Are you proud of that, or not? Are you willing to end it, or not?”

For a long time Holmes was opposed to media stories about bridge suicides. He thought that if the problem wasn't publicized, suicidal people wouldn't be encouraged to go to the bridge. Over the years, however, the number of deaths didn't go down despite the lack of media attention. In fact, there were more bridge suicides in 2007—thirty-nine—than in any of the previous ten years (also in 2007, more people were stopped from jumping off the bridge—ninety—than in any of the previous ten years, according to Bridge District records). Limiting media coverage wasn't doing anything to save lives; all it was doing was hiding the problem. Holmes decided that it was time to try a different tact. If silence wasn't working, maybe being vocal would.

In 2007, Holmes, in partnership with the nonprofit Bridge Rail Foundation, issued a report that summarized data pertaining to Golden Gate Bridge suicides over the previous ten years. The release date coincided with the seventieth anniversary of both the completion of the bridge and the bridge's first suicide. As much as anything, the report renewed the debate regarding a suicide barrier on the bridge and contributed to the Golden Gate Bridge District's decision in 2008 to add a deterrent. For that, and because Holmes has been the only person to maintain records of Golden Gate Bridge suicides and disseminate the information to the public, the American Association of Suicidology honored him at the organization's 2008 annual conference, which happened to be held in San Francisco. A modest man, Holmes accepted the award while minimizing his contribution. He preferred that the spotlight be focused on bridge suicides and what can be done to prevent them, not his personal role.

Holmes issued a second, even more comprehensive report two years later. There was still no suicide deterrent on the bridge, nor was one imminent. While Bridge District directors had approved a net—the first time in history that the board voted in favor of a physical deterrent on the bridge—the board had done next to nothing to see that one was erected. No money had been raised for construction, nor did the board develop any plans to identify potential funding sources. Indeed, it seemed to be business as usual, with the deaths continuing unabated.

Both reports provide a clear picture of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers—where they live; their age, gender, race, and marital status; whether their jump is witnessed; and their last-known profession or occupation. The reports also refute some common myths. For instance, most people who jump from the bridge don't come from far away—certainly not from all over the world. They live locally. According to Holmes, 93 percent of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers are from California, 90 percent are from northern California, and 80 percent are from the San Francisco Bay Area. Only 6 percent are from elsewhere in the United States, and fewer than ι percent are from another country.

Holmes's report contained more data. Eighty percent of jumpers were white, nearly three-fourths were male, and the median age was forty—considerably younger than people who suicide by other means. The youngest victim in Holmes's reports was fourteen (Marissa Imrie, the girl who took a $150 cab ride to the bridge), the oldest was eighty-five. As for marital status, 56 percent of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers had never married, 19 percent were divorced, 5 percent were widowed or their status was unknown, and 19 percent were married. Nearly three-fourths of Golden Gate Bridge jumps had been witnessed.