The Final Leap (8 page)

While preventative measures were being implemented at other sites that were developing reputations as suicide magnets, business continued as usual on the Golden Gate Bridge. Commuters crossed daily, tolls were collected, tourists took snapshots, the bravery of bridge workers was extolled, and people everywhere continued to marvel at the beauty of it all.

What also continued were bridge suicides. “Why do they make it so easy?” one jumper lamented in a suicide note.

For the families of the victims, whose numbers increased every month, it wasn't business as usual. Instead, it was the beginning of their worst nightmare, a nightmare that, try as they might, they could never fully wake from.

Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl.

—Suicide note of Marissa Imrie, age 14,
  who jumped in 2001

It is widely believed that each suicide directly affects at least six people, family members and close friends. Since there are more than 35,000 suicides every year, on average, in the United States, roughly 200,000 Americans lose a loved one to suicide annually. Over ten years, that's two million people, all of them grieving a new, inexplicable, and often preventable death.

The dark trail of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge over decades has left thousands of people to mourn. In uncovering the personal stories of victims and their families, one learns how silence and stigma have conspired to mask the depth and breadth of the social costs of these suicides.

Renee Milligan's fourteen-year-old daughter, Marissa Imrie, jumped from the bridge on December 17, 2001. Marissa was a straight-A student at Santa Rosa High School, the same high school her mother graduated from. Ironically, Milligan had chosen the Golden Gate Bridge as the subject of a senior class report. Although she was afraid of heights, Milligan had walked across the bridge as part of her research. She was awed by the immense towers and steel cables, and chilled by the sight of the water far below. Little did she know that many years later her first-born daughter would become a bridge casualty.

Marissa's good grades were a source of pride to her divorced parents, but not to Marissa. She was more concerned with how she looked than how she scored in school. Like many teenagers, she considered being popular more important than being smart. In her mind she was overweight and unattractive, even though in photos she appears pretty and athletic (she was on the school's cross-country track team).

Santa Rosa is fifty miles north of San Francisco. Because she was too young to drive, Marissa collected all her money and took a $150 cab ride to the bridge. The cab driver asked her why she wasn't in school. Marissa replied that she was eighteen and attended junior college. On the bridge, Marissa passed a maintenance worker. He looked at her and said hello. She didn't reply, just continued walking. Near a lamppost she placed her wallet on the ground. Then she climbed the bridge's short railing and without any apparent hesitation she jumped.

After Marissa died, her mother examined files on Marissa's computer and discovered that her daughter had visited suicide Web sites. One site recommended jumping from heights of 250 feet above water if a person wanted to be virtually certain of dying.

Renee Milligan was so devastated by Marissa's suicide that she considered jumping off the bridge, too. Only the presence of her other daughter, age five, stopped her. Over time, with the help of therapy and a support group of mothers whose children had killed themselves, Milligan's thoughts of suicide faded. She began working with troubled teenagers at the high school, talking with them about suicide and about healthier ways to deal with stress. She also established the Marissa Imrie Scholarship Fund with proceeds coming from an annual dinner that Milli-gan hosts at the school.

Milligan did one more thing: she filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Golden Gate Bridge District. It was the second suit filed against the district in ten years. Milligan didn't seek financial restitution; she sought a suicide barrier. “Through their acts and omissions,” Milligan's suit charged, “Defendants have authorized, encouraged, and condoned government-assisted suicide.”

The response of district officials made their position clear. “Plaintiff's injuries, if any, were the result of Plaintiff's own actions (contributory negligence),” they alleged. In other words, if Milligan suffered personally or emotionally from Marissa's death— and the district wasn't admitting that she did—she herself was to blame for neglecting her daughter's needs and failing to monitor her daughter's movements. Moreover, Bridge District lawyers said, “Plaintiff cannot show that Ms. Imrie used the property with due care for the purpose it was designed.” Bridges are made for traveling across, the district claimed, not jumping from, regardless of how easy it is to do the latter.

Similar arguments have been made—usually successfully— defending gun shops that sell firearms used in homtcides and suicides. Milligan's suit, like the Pattison's claim before it (discussed in chapter 2), was dismissed without cause. Several years after Marissa's death, her father hanged himself. In the note he left, Tom Imrie said that it was too painful for him to live without his daughter.

Dave and Jean Hull's daughter jumped from the bridge on October 26, 2003. Kathy Hull, twenty-six, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, filled the gas tank of her white Honda Accord, drove an hour-and-a-half to San Francisco, crossed the Golden Gate Bridge at twilight, and parked at Vista Point. From there she began walking across the bridge. Midway, she laid down her purse, climbed over the railing, and stood on the chord. Before anyone could stop her, she placed her cell phone on the girder and jumped. A bridge worker found the phone and pressed the home number on it. When Dave Hull answered, the bridge worker asked him if he'd lost his cell phone on the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge worker also told Dave that Kathy Hull's purse was found on the bridge. Hull and his wife sat in stunned silence. A short time later, a police officer called. Kathy's car had been found in the parking lot at Vista Point, on the Marin side of the bridge. That night, the Hulls were notified that their daughter's body had been retrieved by the Coast Guard after someone on the bridge had seen and reported it.

Dave Hull's world stopped. For weeks he didn't shave, get haircuts, tend to his garden, or report to work. He ate because he was told to, showered and brushed his teeth mindlessly, and didn't want the world to go on. “It was as if I could be closer to her if nothing changed,” he says. “It was Joan Didion's magical thinking; just a few hours separated me from Kathy alive. That's not much. Isn't there something I could do that would change that?”

The year before Kathy died, Dave walked 120 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, from the high desert to Mt. Whitney, the same path conservationist John Muir had followed. Dave planned to walk another section of the trail the following summer, and Kathy had asked to come along. He doesn't know if he'll ever make the trip now. “The Japanese have a saying,” he says. “ ‘White hair should go before black hair.' ” In other words, grandparents should die before parents, and parents should die before children. “Losing a parent is shocking,” he says. “Losing a child is unspeakable.” His voice chokes on the words.

Following Kathy's death, Dave and his wife took eight weeks off work, spending much of the time walking through the redwood park above their home. “We ‘walked in beauty,' as the Navajos say,” he says, “and every glimpse sliced and ached because Kathy loved the outdoors, the natural world, the plants and animals. Each glimpse of beauty, Kathy would never see.” Dave remembers trying to trick himself: “Well, Kathy won't see this,” he'd say, “so I'll have to enjoy it twice as much, for her.' ”

After eight weeks, Dave returned to work. He was employed by the National Park Service as the principal librarian at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. It was a position he held for 38 years, until he retired in December 2010. From his office window he could see the Golden Gate Bridge. “I hated the words, ‘move on,' ” he says. “It felt like a denial of Kathy, a forgetting of her, an erasure. I hated the words, the concept, the world's evidence.” Instead, he ruminated over memories he had of her, agonizing over things he believed he should have done, but didn't. The recriminations were so brutal that he contemplated suicide himself, believing—as many people do who have lost loved ones this way—that he was partly to blame. By not protecting his daughter, he was in some degree responsible for her death.

“Of course I did not kill my daughter,” he says today. “Kathy jumped off the bridge. But in those first few weeks I conducted an excruciating accounting, attempting even to put percentages of responsibility upon everyone.” He ticks them off: upon himself and his wife; upon the mental health clinic at school where Kathy, four days before she jumped, sat for three hours waiting to see a particular therapist, but finally had to leave for class without seeing him; upon Kathy's roommates and friends who might have heard “Kathy's last muted announcements of intent;” upon the board of the Golden Gate Bridge District who for seventy years took no meaningful action to prevent bridge suicides; upon the general public who preferred the views to a taller railing; and, of course, to Kathy herself, who “bears the largest single assignment of responsibility,” Hull says. “It was she who made and carried out the decision. Whether all the percentages of responsibility that the rest of us bear amount to more than 50 percent, I could never decide, but it is possible that all of us together could have prevented it [Kathy's death].”

One reason why Dave Hull didn't follow through on his thoughts of suicide was because, like Reneé Milligan, he had another child. It was bad enough that his son had lost a sibling, Dave reasoned, he couldn't lose a parent, too. At the same time, Dave remembers how close he came. “Suicide is contagious,” he says. “It puts everyone else at risk.” In time, Dave resumed elements of his life. He wrote poetry about Kathy. He returned to the Park Service. He disposed of Kathy's possessions, including her car. He also began talking about the need for a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge.

“It had nothing to do with a resolution to produce something positive out of an awful event,” he tells me. “It was rage and a sense of rightness that drove me to involvement.… The bridge exerts a powerful, even mythical allure. If you don't believe me, walk alone to the middle of the bridge and look over the railing at the water below. That bridge fosters the myth of the perfect death, the gold standard of suicide. Those in pain are in great danger on the bridge. Don't go near it when you're having a bad day. The barrier is too late for Kathy, but it's not too late for me. It's not too late for you. It's not too late for your child. It's not too late for our children.”

The lack of a suicide deterrent consigned Jonathan Zablotny to an early death as well. A high school senior, Jonathan, while bright, was plagued by chronic procrastination. He turned in papers late and missed deadlines, including the deadline to apply for the University of California system. His parents tried to prod him gently, but that just seemed to make things worse. When a teacher warned his mother that Jonathan might not pass senior year history unless he turned in a paper on the Challenger space shuttle explosion—a topic Jonathan chose—his chances of getting into Reed College in Oregon, his first choice, were jeopardized.

The morning of February 1, 2005, he threw his backpack over his shoulder and set off on foot for the six-block walk from his home in San Francisco to school. He didn't make it. No one knows what time he arrived at the Golden Gate Bridge, but pedestrians saw his body floating in the water at 4:45
P.M.,
nine hours after he left home. He was still wearing his backpack. A few days later, his aunt found a note on his computer. “I'm a coward” the note read. “I'm taking the coward's way out and it should be honestly said what has happened, I have struggled with the same problem for 6 years and it is painfully obvious to me that I cannot overcome it for any length of time and be happy. jonathan zablotny.”

In Mary and Ray Zablotny's Queen Anne Victorian home, Mary shows me photos of Jonathan, including his high school graduation photo—the last photo taken of him. There are also photos of Jonathan's older brother, Dave. Dave worked as an auto mechanic for a long time, Mary says, until recently, when he went back to school. “Dave gave himself the time he needed to figure life out,” Mary says wistfully. “Jonathan didn't. He lost faith in himself.”

The night before Jonathan died, his mother was unnerved. She remembers thinking that he had a look in his eyes she hadn't seen before. “I didn't understand it at the time,” she says. “It's called the 1,000-yard stare. I thought he was upset about the paper, but I think now he was staring his own death in the face.” It was Monday, and Jonathan had done all of the research for the Challenger paper that was due Friday, so there should have been enough time, Mary says. But Jonathan was running lights and sound for the school play, which had dress rehearsals every night that week. “I told him, ‘Come home. I'll help you on the paper as much as I can,' ” Mary says.

Jonathan didn't seem any different the next morning. He wasn't sullen or withdrawn following the fight he'd had with his parents over the Challenger paper. He also wasn't buoyant as some suicidal people are once they develop a plan and feel like they've taken control of their life. When Mary told Jonathan that she loved him and wanted him to be happy, he just nodded, picked up his backpack, and headed out the door.

Tuesday night, when he hadn't come home, she called his friends and was told that Jonathan never went to school. In all likelihood he wandered around the city. A short time later she received the news that no parent ever wants to hear.