Later, Mary was sitting in her bedroom when Brian came in. He looked pale, and she noticed a red mark on his neck. Brian told her it was just a rash. She said it didn’t look like a rash. Brian admitted that he had bought a rope that day and had been trying to hang himself in the attic. But his ears had started popping and the rope had slipped. Mary was unnerved, but because Brian had been in such good spirits the past few days, she did not really believe him, and she remembered a counselor telling them years before that if someone has to tell you about a suicide attempt, it’s not serious. “Come on, Brian,” she said. “Wasn’t that stupid.” She even teased him a little—there wasn’t even room enough to stand up straight in the attic. When she and her husband talked about it later, they agreed that if Brian had really wanted to kill himself, he would have done it. In any case, Brian was scheduled to see Dr. Kornhaber at noon the following day.
In the morning Brian talked with his mother in the kitchen before she left for work. He seemed a little shaky but not unusually so. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Mom,” he said. “I just don’t know.” “Just try and take it day by day, Brian,” his mother said. “Day by day.” They talked about the previous evening, and she kidded him lightly: “Why did you pick the attic? We wouldn’t have found you for days.” “Well, I wouldn’t want to bother anybody,” said Brian. She joked, “Sure, we would have smelled you in about three days.” They talked briefly about Arnold Caputo, a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who had hanged himself three weeks earlier in his parents’ home in Mount Vernon, fifteen miles south of Bedford Hills. Mary said what a shock it must have been for his family to find him.
Brian seemed okay. He told her his plans for the day. He was borrowing her car to do some errands—to fill a prescription for lithium and buy some toothpaste—before meeting Dr. Kornhaber at noon. When Brian left at eight-thirty, he gave his mother a big hug and a kiss. “Good-bye, Ma,” he said. “Good-bye, Brian,” she said. “Drive carefully.”
At eleven Pat called Dr. Kornhaber from his office, as he usually did before Brian’s sessions, to tell him how things had been going since the last meeting. He described how pleasant and relaxed the weekend had been, but when he told him about Brian and the rope in the attic, the psychiatrist was immediately concerned. He told Pat to try to reach Brian. Pat called home, but Brian wasn’t there. Mary hadn’t heard from Brian either. Brian missed his noon appointment. At two Dr. Kornhaber called Mary and urged her to go to the police department and report Brian as missing and suicidal. Mary thought he was overreacting—Brian had been gone only a few hours—but the psychiatrist insisted. She thought the police would find him immediately because the whole town knew the license plate with the Harts’ initials—MFH–PJH. But as the afternoon wore on, she grew increasingly anxious. Yet even that night as she and her husband lay in bed unable to sleep, listening for Brian, they believed he would return. “I fully expected him to come in,” says Mary, “because this wasn’t the first time it had happened, and in the past he had always turned up.”
Next morning at work, every time the phone rang Mary picked it up expecting it to be Brian saying, “I’m home.” She couldn’t concentrate. Shortly before noon she called her husband, who hadn’t gone to work that day, and asked him to come and get her. When she got home, she made some phone calls to members of the family. While she was talking to her daughter in California about Brian’s disappearance, she heard a knock on the front door. Mary hurried downstairs. The police lieutenant was telling her husband that the car had been found at the rear of Oakwood Cemetery in Mount Kisco, several miles from their house, the motor still running, vacuum hoses carrying exhaust from the tailpipes into the car. Brian might have been in the car as long as twenty-four hours. Pat and Mary Hart were amazed to find that mixed in with the shock and the sadness there was a feeling of relief. “It was over,” says Pat. “He was in such a struggle within himself, and that struggle was finally over.” Mary says, “Brian had found his peace at last.”
The funeral was held on St. Patrick’s Day. St. Matthias, a small Catholic church, was filled with more than two hundred people. Mary’s brother, a monsignor who had baptized Brian, said the Mass. Brian’s three brothers and three friends, two from Kennedy and one from Anderson, were pallbearers. At Mary’s request the organist added some traditional Irish music to the recessional. “The funeral was quite impressive, actually,” says Mary. “Brian would have been very uncomfortable about all the fuss, I’m sure. He didn’t like to be fussed over.”
In the following weeks Pat and Mary talked with their children, laughing and weeping as they shared memories of Brian’s ups and downs. They talked with Dr. Kornhaber, who had been stunned by Brian’s death. They looked everywhere for a note. They searched the house, scoured the car, checked the pockets of Brian’s clothes, and even played through the tape on the tape recorder in case he had recorded a last message. Each day they checked the mail, thinking he might have written them a letter, but they found nothing. Although Mary recognized that even if they found one it could never fully explain Brian’s death, she would have liked to find something.
They also read through Brian’s journals and notebooks, hoping to gain some insight, some clues. They didn’t find a single key that explained everything; they learned little that was new or surprising. But they realized his highs had been higher, his lows lower, and the change from one to the other more abrupt than they had known. His journal brimmed with bittersweet evidence of his determination: his hopes, schemes, pep talks, self-exhortations, and renewed vows to start afresh. Even in the last week of his life he had compiled lists of things he wanted to buy for his room—posters, plants, sketchbooks—as well as notes about goals for his art and ideas about where to market his work. The last thing Brian wrote was a note to himself on his clipboard Thursday night, four days before his death: “I’m going to stop the pot. I’m going to get it together. I’m going to clean up my act.”
IV
SOMETHING IN THE AIR
A FEW HOURS AFTER Brian’s body was found, the media began calling. In the days that followed, as the Harts struggled with their shock over Brian’s death, they also struggled with the flood of journalists who clogged the telephone lines at Mary’s office and patrolled Bedford Hills in search of interviews. One afternoon Pat came home to find a television reporter waiting in his driveway. Pat politely refused to answer her questions, but when he opened the front door, the reporter began to follow him in. After she was finally persuaded to leave, she drove into Bedford Hills and found a teenager on the street to interview. That night the Harts watched the evening news as a boy who had never met Brian was asked why teenagers kill themselves. “I guess these rich kids don’t know what to do with their time,” he replied.
Brian’s death made the headlines in every newspaper the Harts saw: “Suicide Stuns W’chester,” wrote the New York Post, and in the following edition: “Town Mourns Suicide Teen.” The New York Times was more cautious: “Another Teen-Ager Is Believed a Suicide in Westchester Area.” The Gannett Westchester Reporter Dispatch wondered, “Another Teen-age Suicide?”
Brian Hart’s death brought the number of teenage suicides in the Putnam-Westchester area to five in less than six weeks. Ten days after the suicide of Robbie DeLaValliere on February 4, 1984, Justin Spoonhour had hanged himself. Two days later eighteen-year-old Jimmy Pellechi shot himself. Eight days later Arnold Caputo, nineteen, hanged himself in his parents’ home in Mount Vernon. And now Brian. With each death the press coverage grew exponentially, and by now the “Westchester suicides,” as they were called, were the top story on the nightly news, not only in New York but across the country. The suburbs north of New York City responded with a growing feeling of panic. At first many had believed that the series of suicides was a coincidence. None of the teenagers had known each other or attended the same school. But as the toll began to mount, the suspicion grew that these deaths were somehow connected. Had one suicide triggered another? Can reading abo
ut suicide in the newspaper or hearing about it on TV cause suicide? Is suicide contagious? When would it stop? Would it stop? Who was next?
Certainly the hysteria was contagious. Crisis hotlines, school officials, guidance counselors, and therapists were swamped by calls from anxious parents seeking reassurance. “My son’s been withdrawn lately,” they’d say. “I don’t want him to end up like those other boys.” News programs publicized the warning signs of teenage suicide, and parents checked their children for symptoms of depression. “You get paranoid,” said the Westchester mother of a thirteen-year-old at a workshop on adolescent suicide. “You look for red eyes to see if he hasn’t been sleeping. You look to see if he’s sleeping too much.”
Therapists struggled to explain the situation. Suicide, said one Westchester psychiatrist, is “a contagious illness. It’s not something that spreads from one person to another, like a cold. It’s something that’s in the air, in the culture, in the environment.” In an article on the “Westchester suicides,” Susan Blumenthal, head of the Suicide Research Unit at the National Institute of Mental Health, speculated that suicide could become “sort of like punk rock—something that catches on.” Even Westchester County mental health commissioner Eugene Aronowitz, who had from the start firmly insisted the suicides were unconnected, was ruffled. “They seem to be related to each other because one seems to be kicking off the other,” he told Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News, “so to that extent, until we put a stop to it in some way, we’ve got an epidemic here.”
On April 7, three weeks after Brian Hart’s death, eighteen-year-old Kelly Keagan of Carmel, a small town in Putnam County, hanged herself in her dormitory room at Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh.
On Friday, May 25, seventeen-year-old Charles Castaldo Jr. shot himself in the head in a bedroom of his father’s home in Greenburgh, near Scarsdale.
The following Monday nineteen-year-old Kevin Harlan was found hanging in a stairwell outside a church in the tiny middle-class community of Sparkill across the Hudson River in Rockland County. His death brought the number of teenage suicides in the tricounty area north of New York City to eight in four months.
As horrifying as the “Westchester suicides” were, they were hardly unique. Indeed, they merely added to the growing evidence that youth suicides tend to occur in bunches, evidence that, in the 1980s, focused America’s attention on adolescent suicide as never before. Even as Justin Spoonhour and Brian Hart were taking their lives, in Arlington, Texas, a Dallas suburb, there were five youth suicides in the first four months of 1984. In Beverly Hills, California, there had been three between January and April. And before that, starting in February 1983, there had been eight in fourteen months in Plano, Texas. In Columbus, Ohio, there had been five in a single month, including three freshmen at the same high school in one weekend. In 1982, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, there had been three in seventeen days. In 1980, in Englewood, Colorado, three in five months at the same high school. In 1979, in West Milford, New Jersey, six in twenty months. Beginning in 1978, in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, twenty-eight in seventeen months.
Was there something in one suicide that acted as a “triggering incident” for another? Did each successive suicide lower the threshold for the next, as a firecracker, once lit, detonates the rest of the string? Adding to the fear was the confusion of the experts who struggled to explain the phenomenon. Their bafflement was reflected in the variety of words they used to describe the various episodes: epidemic, rash, copycat syndrome, serial suicides, ripple effect, cascade, clump, contagion, fever, outbreak, chain, follow the leader, domino effect. Eventually, they would settle on the slightly more clinical-sounding cluster.
While these terms seem to suggest that self-destruction might be catching, in the fashion of measles or the flu, suicide doesn’t pick its victims that randomly. Researchers have long suspected that when one suicide occurs, it may lower the threshold for vulnerable people in the same geographic vicinity. People with a previous suicide in the family, as we have learned, have an incidence of suicide eight times higher than the general population. Yale researchers Bruce Rounsaville and Myrna Weissman studied sixty-two patients who were seen in an emergency room following suicide attempts; four had made their attempt within four weeks after the suicide or suicide attempt of someone to whom they were close. In three of the four cases a similar method was used. They concluded that clustered suicidal behavior was not infrequent. In certain settings, often confined places in which there is a rigid social structure, one suicide seems to spur others. Clusters have occurred in prisons, boarding schools, colleges, army barracks, and mental hospitals. After a suicide most hospitals routinely place the rest of the patients under heightened security or “suicide watch.”
Adolescents, at a developmental stage in which they are highly suggestible, may be especially prone to imitation in suicide. Various estimates suggest that clusters may account for 1 to 5 percent of teen suicides—suicides that wouldn’t have occurred at that time if the victims hadn’t been “exposed.” “When a suicide happens, even people who don’t know the person are affected,” says former Harvard psychologist Douglas Powell, who has counseled students after campus suicides. “One always has the thought, ‘This could happen to me. Is it going to happen to me? If it happened to him and he didn’t seem troubled . . .’” One adolescent suicide will, in a sense, bring other suicidal adolescents to the surface, but experts agree that the suicide can influence only someone who is already vulnerable. “Reading about a suicide does not make someone suicidal,” emphasized Judie Smith, the program director at the Suicide and Crisis Center in Dallas who worked with Plano students, parents, and teachers after the 1983 cluster. “But if that person is already at risk of suicide, the media reports may inadvertently convey the message that it’s okay to kill yourself, that suicide is an acceptable solution to your problems.” Westchester psychiatrist Samuel Klagsbrun says, “When one kid actually goes ahead and does the unthinkable, it’s almost as if it gives permission to others to also do the unthinkable.”
The more attention a suicide provokes, the more a “permission” is apt to seem like an invitation. “The way we handle this frightens me,” says psychologist Pamela Cantor. “There is often so much adulation after a teenage suicide—they name a school building after him, they have a ceremony, they dismiss school for the day. A kid who has felt lonely and out of it can suddenly go from being a nonentity to being a hero.” A letter to columnist Ann Landers described a thirteen-year-old Cincinnati girl who had been unable to make the cheerleading squad or to get admitted into any campus club. When she won a raffle at a pizza parlor entitling her to a pizza dinner for fifteen, she turned down the prize, saying she didn’t have fourteen friends. A few weeks later she killed herself. At her funeral more than two hundred schoolmates signed the guest book, wept, and placed flowers on her casket.
After Arnold Caputo was buried, front-page articles described the posthumous outpouring of grief and affection for the young rock musician, noting that according to his wishes he was buried with his guitar. “Is it important for us to know that?” wonders a Westchester high school counselor. “A troubled kid who reads that may say, ‘Hey, I’ll go out with my basketball or my hockey stick.’” Like Tom Sawyer, who enjoyed fantasizing about the effect of his death on the Widow Douglas, a vulnerable teenager may imagine the effect of his suicide on those left behind. “I’ve talked to lots of people, like over a hamburger at lunch, about who would be at our funerals if we died,” says a Texas teenager. “If you’re feeling depressed one day and you feel you don’t have any friends, you think, ‘If I died, whoever came to my funeral would be my friends.’” A suicidal teenager may have a magical belief that he’ll be able to savor the reaction to his death. But unlike Tom Sawyer, he won’t be around to attend his own funeral. A lonely, overweight thirteen-year-old California boy who shot himself wrote in his suicide note, “Please tell my classmates what happened and watch if they are sad or if they laugh.”
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If the notion of imitation seems understandable, there is disagreement on what constitutes a cluster. In 1983, Plano, a well-to-do bedroom community twenty miles from Dallas, became embedded in the national consciousness as a prototype when eight adolescents—seven of them students at the same school—killed themselves within fourteen months. (There were, as well, at least sixteen attempts.) After the fourth suicide the national media descended on Plano and competed to describe its expensive homes, manicured lawns, and six-foot “privacy fences.” It was, as one newspaper noted, a town in which adolescents seemed to have “everything to live for.” The town resented the attention, and many people blamed the press for the subsequent suicides. The story was a natural: Plano fit a stereotype as the dark underside of the American dream. “Suicides in Paradise,” headlined the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “Teen-age Suicide in the Sun Belt—An Idyllic Dallas Suburb Is Discovering the Sorrows of Rootlessness and Isolation” was the headline in Newsweek. The San Antonio Light: “Plano: Where Suicide Is Preppy.”
But tagging upwardly mobile boomtowns as incubators for adolescent suicide gave communities like Plano an undue share of notoriety. Over the past few decades, clusters have taken place in cities, suburbs, Inuit villages, farming communities, and on college campuses and Indian reservations. In some instances subsequent suicides knew a previous victim; in others they may have heard of other suicides through word of mouth or the media. Some clusters drew a great deal of publicity; others were hardly mentioned. In some the adolescents used similar methods; in others they used a variety.
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