Teen Suicide

By Amy Wilentz

Matt Reiser had a date with Cheryl Burress last Tuesday night in Bergenfield, N.J., near New York City, but at 6:30 Cheryl called to cancel. "We can't get together tonight," she told Reiser. "We're going to visit Joe." Reiser thought he knew what she meant. Joe Major, a friend of Cheryl's, had fallen 200 ft. to his death off the Palisades cliffs along theHudson River last September in what police considered an alcohol-related accident, and Reiser figured that Cheryl was planning to visit Major's grave that night, as she had many times before. Reiser was wrong.

Instead, Cheryl, 17, and her sister Lisa, 16, went driving around the Bergenfield area with two companions, Thomas Olton, 18, and Thomas Rizzo, 19. At about 3 a.m., the teenagers stopped at an Amoco station and bought $3 worth of gas for Olton's brown Camaro. They asked if they could take the hose from the station's automobile vacuum cleaner, but the attendant refused.

It was a short drive from the gas station to Foster Village apartments, a housing complex. The place was well known. Garage No. 74, vacant at least a month, had been serving as a hangout where groups of Bergenfield teenagers came to drink and to smoke marijuana. The youngsters drove into the dark garage, shut the door and locked it. They left the car idling, its windows open. Then they sat back and waited.

The steadily burning gasoline did its job, releasing deadly carbon monoxide fumes. Within an hour all four were dead. By the end of the week they were notorious. Their multiple-death pact had traumatized their hometown, inspired copycat acts more than 700 miles away and dramatically spotlighted the painful problem of teenage suicide.

It has never been easy to be a teenager, but in the past three decades adolescence seems to have become even more difficult and often fraught with real danger. Since 1950 the suicide rate has tripled among youths from 15 to 24, spurred by changing social mores, increased drug and alcohol use, and greater access to firearms, which are teenagers' favorite means of killing themselves. Teen suicide is not quite the epidemic it is sometimes portrayed to be: the rate of 12 per 100,000 for young people only recently caught up to that of the general population, and suicide is a far greater problem among the elderly. (In 1984 the suicide rate among people 75 to 84 was 22 per 100,000.) Self-inflicted deaths among teens have leveled off recently, although suicides among young men are still on the rise.

More immediately worrisome to parents in comfortable, middle-class Bergenfield (pop. 25,600) is what psychologists call the cluster effect. "After a suicide, there is always an increase" in copycat deaths, says Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist in nearby Westchester County, N.Y., where six boys from the area killed themselves in separate incidents over a four-month period in 1984. The impulse to imitate a suicide can be powerful, especially among adolescents, who tend to romanticize adventure and recklessness. "Kids see that this is a glamorous way to die, a way to get a lot of attention that they couldn't get in life," says Pamela Cantor, president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Youth Suicide. "They see a kid that is a nonentity suddenly get attention, and that is what they have been struggling for."

Youngsters may not fully understand the finality of their action. Chicago Psychologist David C. Clark calls this the Tom Sawyer syndrome, in which teens imagine they are staging their own death. Says Barbara Wheeler, a suicide- prevention specialist in Omaha: "I don't think they think about being dead. They think it's a way of ending pain and solving a problem."

Public reaction can exacerbate the contagion effect. Recent studies by the University of California at San Diego and Columbia University in New York City found that the number of teenage suicides increases after television news segments or dramatic programs on the phenomenon. Events last week supported that conclusion. The day after the bodies were discovered in Bergenfield, two teenage girls were found dead under similar circumstances in Alsip, Ill., a ! small suburb (pop. 17,000) south of Chicago. The bodies of Karen Logan, 17, and her friend Nancy Grannan, 19, were discovered in Grannan's car, which was idling in a closed garage attached to the Logan home. Logan clutched a stuffed animal and a rose, Grannan held an album of her wedding photos. On the dashboard of the car, the two had left nine sealed letters to friends and relatives, as well as two notes stuck under the windshield wipers. Said Alsip Police Chief Warner Huston: "The publicity surrounding the Bergenfield incident probably gave them the impetus."

In retrospect, the Bergenfield deaths included many of the warning signs of teenage suicides: previous attempts, drug or alcohol abuse, recent depression, severe problems in school or at home, a sense that other options had been exhausted. Olton, Rizzo and Cheryl Burress had all dropped out of Bergenfield High. Lisa had just been suspended. Friends say that both Rizzo and Olton had been treated at drug- or alcohol-rehabilitation clinics. Police found superficial razor slashes on both Rizzo's and Olton's wrists the morning their bodies were discovered.

In fact, their deaths may have been part of an unacknowledged suicide cluster in Bergenfield. The death of Joe Major -- a leader among the fringe students at Bergenfield High, who self-mockingly call themselves burnouts -- deeply affected his circle of friends. Major's was only one of four suspicious deaths among Bergenfield youths in the nine months before last week's quadruple suicide. Two other young men were hit by trains, and another acquaintance walked into a pond and drowned. All the previous deaths were alcohol related.

But cluster warning signals, like other indications of suicidal tendencies, can often be ignored by parents, peers and teachers. "Everybody is in such a rush that we don't take the time to listen to our youngsters," says Elaine Leader, co-founder of a teen crisis hotline at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In cases of cluster suicides, notes Charlotte Ross, executive director of the Youth Suicide National Center, "people grossly underestimate the grief reaction" of adolescents to the deaths of their friends. Lisa Burress, for example, had dated Joe Major for six months before his death and was still skipping classes to visit his grave half a year after he died.

As teen cluster suicides have devastated communities across the country in recent years, school systems have set up counseling networks, including suicide-prevention training for teachers and students, suicide hotlines and community- and parent-awareness programs to help identify and deter potential victims. But problem kids often ignore offers of help. Although Bergenfield prides itself on the number of youth-support programs operating in the school district, many students did not seem to be aware of them.

The day after the Bergenfield suicides, a group of teenagers paid a night- time visit to garage No. 74 at Foster Village and spray-painted the once pastel blue door black, the paint streaking down its surface in places. Though the teenagers of Bergenfield are frightened and hurt by the deaths of their friends, it may be the parents whose shock and fear are the greatest. The adults of Bergenfield can only pray that the Pied Piper visiting their town will spare the rest of their children. "When something like this happens, I think a lot about my kids," says Barbara O'Leary, a hostess at a local diner. "I have to hope I raised them right. These are the dangerous years. You don't always know what's going on inside their heads."

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

Credit: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

Caption: SUICIDE RATES per 100,000 population

Description: Bar chart, 1955-1985, ages 15-24 and all ages.

With reporting by Christine Gorman and Jennifer Hull/Bergenfield, with other bureaus