In short, no one can know exactly what goes through the mind of a person who takes his or her own life. They may have been struggling with suicidal feelings for many years for unknown reasons. They may have barely been managing to maintain balance for weeks, perhaps months, before something finally tips them over the edge. It could be anything or nothing: a look, a gesture, a toothache, a headache, an unpleasant word, a fleeting, transient thought.
After the suicide of Dr. F. from the Tobin Bridge, local residents suggested that antisuicide barriers should be installed, as they have been on other bridges and landmarks known to attract suicidal jumpers. Such arguments are usually overruled on the grounds of expense, the fact that such barriers spoil the “life-enhancing” view (and may themselves even inspire thoughts of suicide), and the “common knowledge” that anybody wanting to kill him or herself will do so in the end, one way or another.
But every human mind is different, and each case is unique. Some people have a constant and profound desire to die that only grows more intense over time. Others may be genuinely suicidal, but if they have no opportunity to act, their feelings may gradually change. The suicidal impulse may manifest itself again when the chance to act arises, but it may not. It may appear in another form, or it may fade away altogether.
The idea that “anybody wanting to kill himself will do so in the end” was disproved at least thirty years ago by the British “gas suicide study,” which found evidence that between 1963 and 1975, the annual number of suicides in England and Wales showed a sudden, unexpected drop at a time when suicide was on the rise in most other European countries. This abrupt decline in suicides, it turned out, correlated with the progressive removal of carbon monoxide from the domestic gas supply, as the government had discovered that natural gas was much cheaper to use. The reduced suicide rate was an unanticipated and accidental consequence of this conversion, proving that most of those unable to kill themselves in the kitchen did not, eventually, look for different keys to Death’s private door.
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Rey Rivera may have had good reason to be in the neighborhood of the Belvedere when he went missing, since the offices of Agora are in Mount Vernon, the historic district north of downtown where the former hotel is situated. He may even have been meeting someone in the Belvedere’s Owl Bar, which is open to the public, although bar staff have no recollections of seeing the conspicuously tall, handsome man that day. Still, even if he went to the Owl Bar, there was no reason for him to be anywhere else in the building, especially not on the roof, which is out of bounds even to condominium owners, who are legally entitled to access all the residential floors. And those who knew Rivera describe him as reliable and responsible, not the kind of person who was prone to spontaneous acts, of which jumping off a fourteen-story building is perhaps the embodiment.
Among the ranks of suicides, those who leap to their deaths have a special place. They are widely agreed to be the most impulsive. All you need is somewhere high. There is no need for any preparation—the gun, the noose, the car in the garage, the plastic bag, the razor blades, the right amount of medication. Most suicide methods hold the promise of pain, but high places are dizzying, intoxicating; with the sight of sky comes the idea of flight and final deliverance. In this regard, gravity is your friend. “To the mouse and any smaller animal,” writes J.B.S. Haldane in his essay “On Being the Right Size,” “gravity presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft.” But as the saying goes, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” Those who leap from high buildings into public places are, even if they are not conscious of it, angry with somebody, or perhaps everybody. They want to make an impact. They want to ruin your day.
The Owl Bar, date unknown
In a 1914 article on the many causes of human fear, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall described those who are afraid they will suddenly jump from a high place with no reason:
Very common is the impulse, usually very sudden, to hurl oneself down from towers, windows, roofs, bridges, high galleries in church or theater, precipices, etc., and not a few grew rigid, livid, clenched their hands and teeth, clung almost convulsively to railings or bystanders, or had to be held by their friends from plunging off in order to escape the tension by “ending it all” or “to see how it would feel” to fall or get the “beautiful sensation” of it.… The pure suicide motive in these cases is often a sudden eruption, it is a good opportunity to die and have it all over in a moment. There is little doubt, however, that this jumping off instinct in the young and old may lead to death without any real plan of suicide.
For many years, the Belvedere was one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, and accessible to anyone with enough money to book a room for the night. Unsurprisingly, it has had its fair share of jumpers. For example, on February 22, 1954, thirty-three-year-old Dr. Marvin Alpert registered at the hotel with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Lorraine. The couple had been married for just over five years, and had a young daughter. Normally, they lived at the Park Drive Manor, a large apartment-hotel in Philadelphia, but the previous October, Lorraine had been admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, suffering from depression.
Dr. Alpert, a respected ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, arrived in Baltimore that morning and went directly to the clinic to pick up his wife to spend the day with her. The weather was chilly, and Mrs. Alpert was in no mood for sightseeing, so it makes sense that the couple spent their conjugal visit at the Belvedere. Dr. Alpert was planning to stay overnight in Baltimore and to return to Philadelphia the following morning. Lorraine had to be back at the clinic by six p.m. About an hour before her curfew, Dr. Alpert left his wife in their fifth-floor room while he went to make a purchase at a nearby drugstore. When he returned, the room was cold, and his wife was nowhere in sight.
The window was standing open. Alpert ran to it, looked over the edge, and saw Lorraine lying unconscious on the roof of the hotel kitchen four stories (about fifty feet) below. An ambulance was called and a crowd gathered. Mrs. Alpert was barely conscious when medics retrieved her from the kitchen roof; they took her to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was found to have two broken legs and a fractured skull. She died two hours later.
Mrs. Alpert, with her history of depression, was clearly at risk, but on the whole, jumpers rarely show the usual warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. Compared to those who use other methods, jumpers are less likely to have known histories of mental illness. They have fewer previous suicide attempts. Jumping from a high place offers ease, speed, and the certainty of death, all of which encourage impulsive action. In general, however, perhaps because it is so resolutely final and demands a certain steely bravado, jumping accounts for only 2 percent of suicides worldwide. In the United States, firearms are the method of choice for men, and overdoses for women. In Europe, where firearms are more difficult to come by, the noose, for men, replaces the gun.
Another reason why the proportion of jumpers is so low is that the world’s highest suicide rates are found in extremely poor countries—for example, Guyana, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and Mozambique—places in which it is very rare to find high buildings that are accessible to ordinary people. As a result, those in rural agricultural areas resort to the method used by around 30 percent of the suicides committed in the world every year, and one of the most painful: drinking pesticides.
As might be expected, jumpers are much more common in densely populated cities known for their skyscrapers. The cities with the most high-rise buildings are also the cities with the highest proportions of jumping suicides. In Singapore, for example, 72 percent of suicides are jumpers; in Hong Kong, the figure is 50 percent; in New York, 23 percent. If you live in a town with no buildings higher than five stories, you are advised to select an alternative method. Suicide gui
delines from the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die advocacy group, suggest that if your town has few buildings higher than four or five floors, jumping might not be the best way of taking your own life, since such relatively low leaps are not always fatal. If you have no choice but to jump from a fourth or fifth floor, the guidelines suggest, you should try to land on your head in order to maximize the chances of brain hemorrhage—the most frequent cause of death for suicidal jumpers. Gruesome as this may sound, according to physicist and philosopher Sascha Vongehr, in a blog entry devoted to the science of suicide, the half-second delay between brain receptor activity and awareness of experience means that the jumper dies before the impact of the landing. This speculation, obviously, cannot be confirmed.
While six floors should be enough to kill you, a drop of at least ten floors is advisable. In such circumstances, you do not have to concern yourself about what part of your body hits the ground first, assuming you have an adult body weight and that you land on a solid surface. Of course, there have been bizarre and miraculous exceptions—people have survived falls from airplanes without parachutes, while others have died after tripping over their shoelaces.
Yet are not all individuals exceptions to the statistical average? The French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed so. In his famous book on the subject, he wrote that “each victim of suicide … gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.” To make sense of the death of Rey Rivera, we must ask what the detective Auguste Dupin in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” describes as “the proper question in cases such as this,” which is “not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’” For detailed particulars, the best place to begin is the autopsy report.
According to this document, Rivera hit the ground feet first. He had rather less external damage than one might expect after a fall of 118 feet, no doubt because his fall was broken around twenty feet from the ground, when he crashed through the roof of the former swimming pool. Still, the report makes nightmarish reading. These are the injuries found on Rivera’s body: two cuts to the forehead, one of which is four inches long; fractures to the nose and jaw; four ejected teeth; fractures to the cheekbone; multiple fractures to the skull from the top of the spine to the eye sockets, resulting in a brain hemorrhage; torn neck muscles, leading to further hemorrhage; cuts and bruises to the chest; two fractures to the collarbone; twenty-four broken ribs, which have punctured the heart and lungs and damaged the liver; a broken pelvis; cuts and tears to the right groin and testicle; many cuts and bruises on the torso in addition to two enormous lacerations on either side, one nine by seven inches long, and the other nine by four; torn skin on the front and back of the arms; legs cut so badly that muscles and tendons can be seen; the right leg broken in two places, with bone protruding through the skin.
V
THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS that Rivera died not long after he disappeared. The medical examiner told Allison that his stomach cavity contained a residue of brown matter, presumably the potato chips he ate before leaving home around four p.m. Since he did not pay the parking attendant, he must have arrived at the parking lot sometime after six that evening, which is when the attendant goes home. If the crash D. and I heard around ten was the sound of Rivera falling through the roof, that leaves six hours between the time he left home and the time of his fatal plunge.
At some point in those six hours, he found his way to the roof of the Belvedere without being seen. The roof is not easy to get to, even for those familiar with the building. Twice, when we first moved in, I went up there to sunbathe. In doing so, I was effectively trespassing, since the roof is definitely out of bounds. It’s a dangerous place. A single thin iron railing immediately opposite the access door is the only barrier against the drop. When I lay down and closed my eyes, the edge of the building always felt much closer than it was, though it was never really very far away. It was too hot and scary and uncomfortable to stay up there for long. Both times, when I got up after lying in the sun, I found myself overwhelmed with dizziness, and had to sit down until I had recovered my balance.
The roof is reached via a ladder in the attic, but the attic is hard to find. There are two ways to get there. One is through a door, accessible only to staff, at the back of the 13th Floor nightclub. The other way is through a door in the service area next to the kitchens on the twelfth floor, which is also off-limits. This door is marked “No Entry.” A resident’s key card is needed in order to take any of the building’s four elevators, but even the card will take you only to the tenth floor. To go any higher, the elevator must be unlocked by the concierge.
From the attic, however, the ladder that leads to the roof is not difficult to find. The rest of the attic space is taken up by the elevator mechanisms, heating and cooling ducts, insulated pipes, fuse boxes, storage areas, and a loft space lit by a dusty glass skylight. When I was up there, someone had put a table and two chairs in this space; on the table were a pack of cards and an ashtray full of stale butts. There was also a dead fern hanging from the rafters in a plastic pot. I wondered whether the bartenders or cleaning staff were using the loft as a place to relax or nap between shifts. Farther back was a narrow hallway leading to a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms where the hotel’s staff once slept.
According to the police report, “it was determined that the roof was accessible.” I do not know where this information came from or what it means, but it is true that in 2006, when Rivera found his way to the roof, the elevator was often left unlocked, many of the fire doors were not alarmed, the security cameras didn’t always work, and the bartenders at the 13th Floor would go up to the roof to smoke, so the roof access door was usually left unlocked.
I think the question that needs to be asked is not whether the roof was accessible, but whether a man who looked like Rey Rivera could have found his way up there without being seen, stopped, and questioned. Even if he knew exactly where he was going and how to get there, this seems hard to fathom. With regard to this latter point, the police report contains another unsourced claim: “The victim had frequented the Belvedere on several occasions in the past.”
The Belvedere has both a bar and a nightclub, and in 2006, the same bar staff worked in both the Owl Bar and the 13th Floor. Allison says she and Rey went to the Owl Bar twice at most—though it is possible Rey may have been there more often with his colleagues from work, since Agora’s offices are close by—but she is certain that Rey never went to the 13th Floor. Allison works in sales, and is very careful with her accounts. During the time she lived in Baltimore, she kept all her credit card receipts (she and Rey rarely used cash) in the accounting program QuickBooks; after Rey’s death, she went back over her records and found no receipts from the 13th Floor. More significantly, the 13th Floor is well known for the spectacular view of downtown Baltimore from its floor-to-ceiling windows, and according to his wife, Rey had such a terrible fear of heights that he was barely able to climb the ladder to put up their Christmas decorations.
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Rivera’s cell phone was a stylish, ultrathin model: the Sanyo Sprint SCP-6000, which weighed just 2.29 ounces. It landed on the annex roof next to his flip-flops, and according to police, it was still “functional.” It seems unusual that after a fall of 118 feet onto the roof’s solid surface, the shell of the phone could remain undamaged, with the LCD screen intact, and the circuit board in full working order.
The surface of the swimming pool roof is a common type of single-ply roofing used in commercial buildings. I ask two friends, one a physicist and the other an expert on the technology of electronic devices, for their opinions. They both say the same thing: that it is unlikely the phone would be intact after the fall, but not impossible. For example, it might have stayed in Rivera’s trouser pocket, since his body appeared to have remained upright, and come out only
when he hit the roof. What was not found on Rey’s body, nor on the roof, was an antique money clip that, according to his wife, he always carried with him. It was a wedding gift from Allison, inscribed with his initials, and she had seen him put it in his pocket before she left Baltimore that morning. In fact, she had never seen Rey without it. The money clip has never been found.
Media reports of the case state that the security cameras at the Belvedere “malfunctioned” on the night of May 16—the evening, presumably, of Rivera’s death. Still, the tape was given to the police, who kept it for weeks, which suggests it must have contained something of interest. When it was finally returned to the Belvedere, Gary Shivers sat with Allison Rivera in the concierge booth and watched the footage with her. She was there for a long time. The tape covered a period until the night before Rey went missing; then it jumped to more current footage, as if someone had deleted the night of May 16.
An engineering study obtained by Stephen Janis for the Washington Examiner concluded that, to judge by the distance Rey Rivera’s body landed from the wall of the Belvedere—an estimated forty-three feet—his velocity on takeoff would have had to be at least 11 mph. The Belvedere roof is narrow and studded with small ventilation ducts; still, there is enough room for someone to run in a straight line for some distance before jumping.
I also talked about the case with Dr. Charles Tumosa, who, before he took up his current position as director of the University of Baltimore’s forensic studies program, ran the criminalistics laboratory at the Philadelphia Police Department. Tumosa agreed that Rivera could not have been pushed from the roof, nor could his fall have been accidental, given the horizontal velocity involved. “I’ve never heard or seen a suicide take a running jump, but there would have to be a certain amount of propulsion,” he added. “That leaves me with the impression that he took a dive off the building.”
An Unexplained Death Page 6