The final leap, p.8
The Final Leap, page 8
“I know I shouldn’t,” Brooks said.
What has helped John and Erika Brooks the most is the support they’ve received from Casey’s friends, who continue to stay in touch with them, as well as the support they’ve been able to provide to these young and impressionable youths. Together, they’re helping each other cope with a tragedy that shouldn’t have ever happened.
Since Casey jumped, hundreds of poignant messages have been posted on her Facebook remembrance page.
“I had this mad intense dream about you last night, it was sweet. it made me think a lot. nobody is like you, and it’s not fair. but I woke up happy even though I missed you more than usual.”
“I put a ‘I heart Casey’ on my window on the driver’s side. [Casey’s parents had these made and gave them to her friends.] Now folks think I have a boyfriend. Seriously, I think I’m going to post those bumper stickers on every stop sign around SF’s Civic Center. You will always be remembered!’
“It was a beautiful day out today. The sun was shining, and there was a glimmer of hope. That made me think of you.”
“You might not be here, physically, but I feel as if part of you is always with me.”
John and Erika Brooks continue to read the postings, learning things that shed a small amount of light on Casey’s death. For instance, a year before she jumped, when Casey was working as a clerk at a Williams Sonoma store, another employee leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Roxanne Makoff was Casey’s best friend. In September 2008 she testified before the Bridge District board of directors. “If you have ever thought about killing yourself, please raise your hand,” she began, then paused. “If you did not just raise your hand, you are lying,” she said. Casey “did not think through the consequences of her actions, and I’ll be the first to tell you that what she did was selfish and thoughtless, but I am also telling you today that with a barrier, she would still be among us. Casey had issues, don’t get me wrong, but her issues only became life or death when she realized the accessibility of the Golden Gate Bridge.” Makoff challenged the belief that someone who’s determined to die will resort to any possible means:
Casey would have never slit her wrists, hanged herself, or overdosed on pills to kill herself.… Her only method of suicide was the Golden Gate Bridge. I have proof of this because just three weeks before her death, I was riding in her car with her across the Golden Gate Bridge when I casually asked her, “If you were to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Call me stupid, call me messed up, call me whatever you want, but in this day and age, a question like this one isn’t uncommon. Casey’s response: “The Golden Gate Bridge, of course. So beautiful, so easy, so clean.” I agreed.… The night of Casey’s death, she completed all of her homework, studied for all of her tests, and carried on normal conversation with us, her friends. Somehow after all of this normality, Casey decided her life wasn’t worth living anymore. It was early in the morning, a lack of sleep had gotten the best of her, and the cold weather dampened her spirits and somehow in her mind she decided it was time to end her life.… Build a suicide barrier. It is imperative. The loss of a life to suicide does not affect only the family and the close friends. It affects an entire community.… Save our loved ones who are similar to Casey Brooks.
Sarah Barr grew up with Casey, and lived on the same street. She said that she was opposed to a suicide barrier before Casey Brooks died and now felt that one was critical to prevent other deaths. In her testimony, she stated,
This is just wrong. Casey should have graduated, she should have gone to college, she should be moving into her dorm right now, but she is not.… We live in an affluent area, and there are pressures to dress well, get good grades, excel at something—whether it be sports, art, debating—it has to be something. We all feel like escaping that pressure at times. That the bridge is so easy to jump from is just wrong. I’m 17, and I’ve known three people who have jumped. There is something wrong with that.… I want a barrier so that every teenager has the opportunity to see what there is to live for.”
Bridge District officials had heard heartfelt testimony before. Families and loved ones of victims had testified. Responders and helpers had testified. Coroner Ken Holmes had testified, as had Kevin Hines, a bridge jump survivor. All spoke articulately and passionately about the need for a suicide barrier. None had quite the same impact as the testimony of Casey Brooks’s friends, however. According to Tom Ammiano, a member of the Golden Gate Bridge District board for twelve years, “When the young people came out, everybody was moved.” Even Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco at the time (now lieutenant governor of California), who previously had made public statements opposing a suicide barrier, changed his mind after hearing Casey’s friends speak.
“The strange thing about the bridge,” says filmmaker Eric Steel, whose 2005 documentary movie The Bridge focused on Golden Gate Bridge suicides (and is discussed in detail in chapter 7), “is that when someone dies there, there’s this big splash and within minutes it’s like nothing ever happened. All the ripples go away. And the traffic keeps moving and the pedestrians are walking and the water’s going under the bridge. But for the families, that ripple keeps going forever.”
That’s as good a description of the impact of suicide in general and Golden Gate Bridge suicides in particular as I’ve ever heard. When a loved one dies by any means, there’s a hole in your heart that can only be mended by time and a strong support system. With suicide, the hole is bigger, the pain tends to be greater, and the recovery period usually is much longer. With the Golden Gate Bridge, there’s the added dimension that society seems to be condoning the death by doing nothing to stop it.
Four days after his father, Charles Gallagher Sr., a successful businessman, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, his son followed him. The younger Gallagher, twenty-four, was a premed student at UCLA. He drove his father’s car to the bridge and jumped from nearly the identical spot. His suicide note was short: “I am sorry … I want to keep Dad company.”
Stories of victims underline the immeasurable human potential that disappears with each suicide. Vince Mulroy, who jumped in 2009, was the starting wide receiver for Stanford in the Blue-bonnet Bowl thirty years earlier, after being a star decathlete and football player at Newport Harbor High School in southern California. Mulroy also was a first-team Academic All-American, recipient of the university’s prestigious J. Walter Sterling Award, and a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. Bill Walsh was his coach. After attaining an MBA from Harvard Business School, Mulroy had a successful career in real estate. He also was an active volunteer with two youth groups. At age fifty-two, suffering from depression and chronic back pain, the latter due to football injuries and a later car accident, he jumped from the bridge, leaving a wife and two teenage children.
Roy Raymond was another casualty. A self-made millionaire, Raymond started Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie company, after being embarrassed to buy his wife a slip in a regular department store. When he sold the company, he invested in a high-end children’s toy store that failed, then in a children’s bookstore that also lost money. Although friends said that Raymond was eternally optimistic and unfazed by business failures, he must have been more depressed than they knew. In August 1993, he drove his Toyota to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote notes for his wife and their children, then jumped.
Duane Garrett jumped, too. A longtime Democratic Party fundraiser and personal friend of former Vice President Al Gore, Garrett managed political campaigns for Walter Mondale, Bruce Babbitt, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein. He also was a political analyst at a television station in San Francisco. Mere hours before he jumped, he left a message at the station saying that he couldn’t do the next day’s show. His car was found in a parking lot near the toll plaza. His body was found floating underneath the Golden Gate Bridge after it was spotted from above.
Dr. Phil Holsten was valedictorian of his high school class in Modesto, graduated from the University of California San Francisco Medical School, completed his residency at Stanford, and was a doctor at California Pacific Medical Center. An avid bicyclist, Holsten told Sarah Cherny, his fiancée and a fellow physician, that he was going to ride in the Marin Headlands on his day off. Instead, according to two witnesses, around 11 A.M. he stopped halfway across the bridge, dismounted, leaned his bike against the railing, placed his helmet over the handlebars, and jumped without any hesitation. It was 2004; he was thirty-three years old.
A year later, Cherny testified before the Bridge District board. As reported by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Joan Ryan, Cherny told board members that Holsten gave no warning signs. “He had already paid for a trip to Guatemala that he was taking with me and my parents,” she said. “I found out later he had been planning a surprise birthday party for me in two weeks.… If there was a barrier, I would have seen him at home that night instead of on a metal gurney after his autopsy.”
Cherny’s father also testified. “You may think it can never happen to you,” Robert Cherny told Bridge District board members. “I am here to tell you that it can.” The elder Cherny taught history at San Francisco State University and was on the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board. He referred to the latter capacity in appealing for a suicide barrier on the bridge. “I sometimes get to vote on saving buildings,” he said. “You get to vote on saving lives.”
Sarah Cherny noted that two of the primary arguments against a suicide barrier—that it will cost too much and that it will ruin the view—were the same arguments that were raised seventy years earlier when people objected to building the bridge itself. Eventually those arguments were overcome—or at least cast aside—by a stronger, prevailing opinion that the cost was worth it and the view would be preserved.
Today, no one questions the cost of the Golden Gate Bridge, although commuters do question the cost of rising bridge tolls, which subsidize the Bridge District’s bus and ferry service (the bridge itself was paid off in 1971). And the view continues to be breathtaking, among the most spectacular in the world. In hindsight it’s easy to see that concerns about the cost and the view were unfounded.
The same will be true when a suicide deterrent is erected on the Golden Gate Bridge. The lives that are saved will be worth the price, and the view won’t be affected in any significant way.
It’s a rare occurence to hear someone say that a suicide deterrent mars the appearance or views of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, or other architectural wonders of the world. People are so used to them that they hardly even notice their presence or if they do notice they don’t bemoan the fact that they’re there. The barrier is accepted as part of the structure— unfortunate perhaps, but necessary. Tourism isn’t affected.
The same can’t be said about the Golden Gate Bridge, at least not yet. Each month produces more jumps, more witnesses to jumps, and more loved ones who are left to mourn. Each month also produces more attempted jumps, more police interventions, and more people who are escorted off the bridge for their personal safety. Simultaneously, there are many reasons why someone who’s suicidal chooses to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. There’s the allure of the bridge, the mystique, and the romanticism. There’s the belief that death will be quick and painless. And there’s the easy access.
Several years ago, Patricia Dunn was interviewed on TV’s 60 Minutes about her controversial ouster as president of the board of computer giant Hewitt-Packard. Dunn’s professional life was in shambles, her integrity was attacked, her health was declining, and she was reeling emotionally. Leslie Stahl, the 60 Minutes reporter, asked Dunn how she was dealing with everything when the story was so public and she was receiving so little support from former colleagues. Dunn paused, started to answer, couldn’t find the words, then said softly, “Well, there’s always the Golden Gate Bridge.”
Dunn wasn’t at a point where she was seriously contemplating suicide. Still, she was voicing the thought that many local people have if things get really bad: with the bridge so close and omnipresent, it’s always an option. Moreover, loved ones are spared the physical shock of a person’s death—there’s no horrifying sight to discover, no room that’s forever associated with a tragic act, no gruesome cleanup. Once you’re over the side, it’s the problem of trained professionals—Coast Guard crew members and coroner’s investigators. That is, if your body is found. If it’s not found, so much the better; you just disappear.
The only thing that’s left is a ripple—a ripple that may be felt for generations.
FOUR
Opening Up
Early on, I was indifferent to suicides from the bridge. After being here, though, and talking with families of the victims, it swung me completely over to the other side.
—Ken Holmes, coroner of Marin County
With Golden Gate Bridge suicides, it’s often the coroner who uncovers the complexity and pain inherent in the act of jumping. The stories conveyed by this public servant illuminate a mesh of psychological and physical suffering.
Most suicides are planned. When Diane Hansen, thirty, of Sausalito jumped from the bridge, it was two weeks after her mother died and was cremated. As Hansen fell, narrowly missing a Harbor Queen cruise ship filled with tourists, she held onto a 10-by-10-inch white box that contained her mother’s ashes. Stephen Hoag, twenty-six, of San Francisco, left a suicide note that said, “Do not notify my mother. She has a heart condition.” There was no need to notify his mother, however—she saw it on the evening news. Hoag was the five hundredth official suicide from the bridge.
Even when the act is planned, however, the moment of action may remain in doubt. On April 24, 1998, for example, two women ages twenty-two and fifty-one who did not know each other ended up at the same spot on the bridge at the same time with the same intention of killing themselves. They sat on the chord, on the other side of the railing, talking to each other. A Bridge Patrol officer noticed them and tried to talk them back to safety; instead, one woman stood up and stepped backward off the bridge. The other woman then followed her.
A few suicides appear almost fanciful. John Thomas Doyle, forty-nine, of San Francisco died leaving a suicide note that read, “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.” Eilert Johnson, seventy, of Oakland held a hat on his head with both hands the whole way down as if he was afraid it would blow away.
The majority of deaths resulting from Golden Gate Bridge jumps are investigated by the Marin County coroner’s office. Prior to 1991, the bodies of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers were delivered to Letterman Hospital, an Army hospital in the Presidio at San Francisco. When the Coast Guard station in San Francisco was relocated to Marin County in 1991, however, the coroner’s office in Marin began receiving the corpses.
Ken Holmes worked in the Marin County coroner’s office for thirty-five years, starting as an investigator in 1975. In 1998 he was elected coroner, and he held that position until December 31, 2010, when the office was merged with the sheriff’s department and Holmes retired. In 2005 he was asked by a reporter about the physical impact on a body from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. “Some people seem to think that jumping off the bridge is a light, airy way to end your life,” Holmes said, “like going to join the angels. I’d like to dispel that myth. When you jump off the bridge, you hit the water hard. It’s not a pretty death.”
A jumper’s body travels at a speed of seventy-five miles per hour. Upon impact the outer body stops but the internal organs keep going, tearing loose from their connections. Sternums, clavicles, and pelvises shatter. Aortas, livers, and spleens are lacerated. Skulls, ribs, and vertebra are fractured. The result is similar to that of a pedestrian who’s struck by a car going seventy-five miles per hour. In many cases, jagged rib bones puncture the heart, lungs, or major arteries, causing the brain to shut down immediately for lack of oxygen-bearing blood.
If a person does not die right away, he or she dies by drowning. Bodies plunge deep into the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay and breathe it in. In rare cases, jumpers not only survive the fall but are able to swim to the surface despite suffering massive internal injuries. They flail away in the water hoping to be rescued, their bodies broken, every breath painful. Overall, about 5 percent of Golden Gate Bridge jumpers drown according to a report in the Western Journal of Medicine, based on a study of 169 Golden Gate Bridge jumpers. The 2 percent who survive the fall hit the water feet first and at a slight angle so that their body arcs back to the surface. Those who land perfectly straight end up diving too deep and drown, while those who land any other way tend to die on impact, with deep bruises on their torso, back, buttocks, and the underside of their arms.
One woman was so intent on killing herself, and so worried about the pain if she survived the fall, that she carried a gun with her to the bridge and shot herself in the head on the way down. She left a note for her roommate saying that she didn’t want to feel the impact of hitting the water or take a chance that she might live.
One Coast Guard officer described the effect of a bridge jump this way: “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up.”
Over the years, Holmes and his staff have witnessed many gruesome sights. They are largely inured to it; after all, if you do autopsies you’d better be comfortable around mutilated bodies. Still, when people hit the water face first, it obliterates features and opens up gaping holes. Other jumpers land on rocks, usually on the north end of the bridge, and their body just comes apart. In some instances only partial remains are found after a body has been in the water for days or even weeks. Nothing is as bad, though, as receiving the body of a child.
In January 1993, a thirty-two-year-old man drove his three-year-old daughter to the bridge, threw her over the side, and followed her. Pam Carter is a senior coroner’s investigator in Marin County. At the time, she was working as a nurse at Marin General Hospital. The daughter, named Kellie, was brought into the hospital’s emergency room, still alive. Doctors worked frantically for ninety minutes trying to save her, but there was nothing they could do. Afterward, Carter was told to take Kellie’s body to the hospital morgue. The thought of leaving the child on a cold slab was abhorrent to her so she borrowed a crib, took it to the morgue, and laid the girl inside. “That had to be the worst,” Carter told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. “This little thing, taken like that by her father, the person she loved and looked up to. It was awful.” Even after that incident, which was well publicized, many people opposed a suicide barrier. The San Francisco Examiner conducted a poll and 54 percent of respondents said they were against it.
