The Final Leap (9 page)

“Do you think Jonathan would be alive today if the bridge had a barrier?” I ask.

Her eyes flash and she answers immediately, “Yes, he'd be alive—especially after everything I've learned about suicide. You fixate on a particular method, and if it's not available to you, you back off, you don't do it.”

“Has opposition to a barrier surprised you?”

Again, she's quick to reply. “The ignorance surprises me. Opponents keep coming up with fact-less arguments. As soon as one argument is proven false, they raise another one, equally fact-less.”

Anyone who thinks that mental health professionals, by virtue of their education, training, and experience can always discern suicidal intentions in their progeny will be surprised to learn that Jonathan's father was chief of psychiatry at a Kaiser hospital. His son's death not only rocked his private life, but caused Ray Zablotny to question his professional competencies. Ray's mother suffered from clinical depression. He'd treated suicidal patients. He was on the hospital's suicide death review committee (a position he resigned from after Jonathan died). He knew the warning signs of suicide, and his son had not exhibited them. “The thing about Jonathan's death,” says Mary, “is that there was practically no warning. He didn't seem unhappy—in fact, just the opposite. There were no major conflicts at home. The only thing lacking in his life was his ability to buckle down with his studies.”

Several weeks after Jonathan jumped, students at his school showed up at the Bridge District board room. Jonathan's best friend, Patrick Fitzgerald, wrote a tender, articulate op-ed piece about suicide, Jonathan's death, and the Golden Gate Bridge. He followed it up with a letter and petitions that he presented to the Bridge District in which he said that the effort to get a suicide barrier on the bridge had become his expression of grief. “These words are my tears,” he wrote in the letter.

“If an 18-year-old can do that,” Mary says, “talk about losing someone he loves, I decided that that must be a good route to take.” It's why she and her husband have been public with their grief.

Mary is an artist, and one of her passions is making labyrinths out of beads. She shows me the labyrinth she designed, made, and always has with her since Jonathan's death. “It's a walking meditation,” she says. Unlike mazes, labyrinths have only one path leading to the center and the same path or a different one that takes you out. There are no wrong turns or dead ends. She sketches the labyrinth first, using special ink that's water and fade resistant.

I ask her how she'll celebrate personally when the bridge has a barrier. She says that she'll make a beautiful and original bicursal labyrinth (the kind with one way in and another way out). As we're talking, she says, “I need to think of the symbolism.” She's silent for just a minute, then says, “The entrance will be when the bridge was built, and farther in the suicides mount. The center will be when the Bridge District no longer can ignore the people, their will and the publicity. The path out is the path to a suicide barrier. When you come out, the barrier is there.”

Most people can't imagine anything worse than discovering that your child, parent, spouse, partner, sibling, or friend killed themselves, especially if they were young or in the prime of life. There is, however, something that's even worse. It's when your loved one dies by suicide and the death is never confirmed. This leaves all sorts of questions unanswered. When do you start grieving? How long do you hold out hope? What's the appropriate time to have a memorial service? Also, with no remains to bury or cremate, where do you go to place flowers or otherwise pay your respects?

If the body of a Golden Gate Bridge jumper isn't recovered and the leap isn't witnessed, the victim's family is placed in limbo. The death cannot be legally verified. There have been a number of instances in which a person made it appear that he or she jumped from the bridge to escape legal, financial, or family problems, then turned up later, in another part of the country or the world, quite healthy and living under an assumed identity. For this reason, the official status of persons who are suspected of jumping but the jump can't be confirmed is “missing.” This creates further hardships for the family.

There is little doubt that twenty-year-old Matthew Whitmer jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge on November 15, 2007. After playing video games at home with his younger brother until 1
A.M.,
he got up five hours later, drove to the bridge, left his car in the south-end parking lot, walked out on the span, and leaped over the side at light pole number ninety-seven. That afternoon his parents were contacted by the California Highway Patrol. A young man had been seen jumping from the bridge at 6:25
A.M.
Matthew's car, with his identification in it, was found abandoned in the parking lot.

Matthew didn't leave a suicide note, and his body was never found. Since his death can't be confirmed, he is legally considered “missing” even though a later investigation of his computer revealed his intent. The last online search he did was to look up whether there was a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge. After he learned there wasn't, he got driving directions. At 6:23
A.M.
he sent a text message to a friend: “Peace Out,” it said. It is, according to his mother, Dayna, the way he said good-bye.

At 8
A.M.
the Coast Guard had stopped searching for his body. That started his parents' worst nightmare. “It was incredibly difficult to spend hours calling all the local hospitals for Matthew or ‘John Doe,' because he left his I.D. in the car,” says Dayna, a medical technician with the Department of Veterans Affairs in Martinez. “More difficult was placing monthly calls to multiple coroner's officers looking for John Doe' or, worse yet, ‘partial remains.' ”

When a person is missing, the family must file a report with the local authority. In California, this information is entered into the state's missing persons database. Families need to provide dental records, as well as items that may be used for DNA matching such as toothbrushes and hair brushes. Parental DNA also may be requested. It can take five years, under California law, before a person is declared dead if his or her body isn't recovered. It's possible to have the declaration made sooner if the family petitions the probate court and provides enough evidence, even if the evidence is circumstantial. Dayna and Mark Whitmer have done that, and as of fall 2011 they are still waiting. The whole process “can be incredibly difficult both emotionally and financially for families,” says Dayna, “especially families with young children who lose a parent off the bridge.”

In 2008, to celebrate what would have been Matthew's twenty-first birthday, Dayna did what she says her son might have done: she got drunk and got a tattoo. The tattoo, just above her heart, has Matthew's name over a green Celtic cross (shortly before his death Matthew had showed interest in his Irish heritage).

Dayna also became an active member of the Bridge Rail Foundation. Founded by Dave Hull after his daughter's death, the all-volunteer organization has one mission—to end suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. Several times in recent years it has staged what is referred to as the “Whose Shoes” exhibit to commemorate everyone who has jumped from the bridge since it was erected. Hundreds of pairs of shoes are displayed—“worn oxfords, floral flip-flops, inline skates, sparkly high heels, fuzzy blue slippers,” as the
San Francisco Chronicle
described it—topped by a pair of World War I boots representing Harold Wobber, the World War I veteran who was the bridge's first reported suicide. The shoes, many of them contributed by family members of jumpers, are stacked neatly and form a large, silent monument in memory of everyone who has died.

In the wake of her son's death, Dayna also put together a booklet to help families deal with the trauma of having a loved one officially declared “missing.” The booklet explains what the authorities will do, what loved ones should do within the first four hours, first twenty-four hours, and next two to three days, and what to tell children. It also provides tips on taking care of yourself, as well as contact information for crisis centers in the Bay Area. Some California Highway Patrol officers as well as the Marin County coroner keep copies of Dayna's booklet on hand to give to grieving families. More recently, Dayna launched the Web site
http://goldengatebridgesuicides.org
. The site, which is dedicated to her son, has an electronic version of her booklet. It also has the most complete listing of suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge to be found. This list was created in consultation with coroner Ken Holmes, and is printed, with permission, in appendix C of this book.

Maria Martinez, a political organizer who once worked for Nancy Pelosi, knows full well the trauma of losing a loved one whose death is not confirmed. In 1988, Leonard Branzuela, Maria's son, was one match away from making the U.S. Olympic wrestling team. Five years later, at age thirty-two, he was a wrestling coach at Lowell High School in San Francisco. On a hot day in June 1993 he got a haircut, then went to his mother's apartment. Her son hadn't told her that he was coming, and Maria was out when he arrived. Leonard waited awhile, then took a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge.

For a week afterward, Maria didn't hear from Leonard, which was unusual. She left messages, but they weren't returned. In July she filed a missing person's report. The following day she received a form letter from the California Highway Patrol (CHP). It was addressed to Leonard and had been forwarded to her from one of his previous addresses. It said that the highway patrol had his wallet and was holding it.

Maria and her grown daughter, Anna—Leonard's sister— drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to retrieve Leonard's wallet and find out what had happened. Maria was handed a CHP report that was dated three weeks earlier. It suggested the possibility of suicide. Although Leonard's body wasn't recovered, a witness described seeing a man in the water below the bridge, and Leonard's wallet was found on the walkway. According to the report, attempts to notify his family were not successful— this despite the fact that Maria's business card and the phone numbers of other family members were in Leonard's wallet. Maria stared at the CHP report in disbelief. She hadn't known that her son might be dead, much less that he probably killed himself. According to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Anna Branzuela “led her wailing mother to the car, and in stunned silence they drove home, across the Golden Gate Bridge.”

The following week, mother and sister rented a helicopter to look for Leonard's body, feeling that they had to do something. It was for naught, however. His remains have never been found. “We never had closure,” Maria Martinez said. “It's not like we can go visit his grave. Where am I going to go—the bridge?”

Feeling helpless and filled with grief, Maria did what the parents of nineteen-year-old Kenneth Pattison had done two decades earlier and what the mother of Marissa Imrie did several years later. She filed a claim for general damages against the Bridge District for “failure to protect the public from access to dangerous and unprotected bridge rails” and “failure to provide suicide prevention barriers.” The suit was dismissed in Superior Court because, under California law, if a person is hurt or killed on state property, plaintiffs can sue only if they are able to prove that the victim used the property “with due care.”

“There's no question that deliberately jumping off a bridge that's over 200 feet from the water is not exercising due care,” said a Bridge District attorney. He added, “The fact that suicides have occurred in the past on the bridge and that, therefore, you could argue, further ones are foreseeable, does not mean we are liable.”

Martia appealed the ruling because it failed to address whether “a mentally ill person bent on suicide is capable of acting with due care.” Citing various court cases, her attorney said that the state legislature surely never intended to absolve a governmental entity from liability in situations where it knew or had reason to know that its property was being used by mentally unstable individuals to kill themselves, yet took no reasonable measures to prevent it.

At the same time that Maria Martinez's suit was being considered, public officials expressed concern that the district might be opening itself to liability if it erected a suicide barrier and someone jumped anyway. Taking precautions to reduce the likelihood of suicide could backfire, they said, if it meant the Bridge District had a duty to prevent suicides and wasn't 100 percent successful in this regard.

In both instances, the prevailing opinion was upheld. Maria's appeal was turned down, and no case law was found to support the position that a public entity is liable if it builds a suicide barrier on property it controls and someone still dies by suicide. Regarding the latter, the Bridge District's own attorney said, “The construction of a suicide deterrent will not subject the District to any greater exposure than it now faces without such a structure.”

An interesting sidebar to all this is that several years later, the Bridge District approved $5 million for a barrier separating bicycle traffic from vehicle traffic on the bridge. As odd as it sounds, the reason why this barrier was erected wasn't to protect bicyclists. After all, no bicyclist had ever been killed on the bridge. And it wasn't erected to protect motorists since they weren't endangered by people riding on the bike path. No, the reason why the bike barrier was approved was because it protected the Bridge District. Bicyclists, you see,
were
using the bridge for the purpose it was designed, and if a bicyclist was hurt or killed because the bridge lacked a safety barrier, then the district would be liable. Thus, one of many ironies concerning the Golden Gate Bridge is that while Maria Martinez's suit didn't result in a suicide barrier, it did contribute, in a roundabout way, to the construction of a bicycle barrier on the bridge.