SUICIDE'S SHADOW

By ELIZABETH GLEICK/SAN PEDRO

If one were to do the senseless thing--to take the path of least resistance, to give it all up for the void--it is easy to see why one might choose to go by leaping from the cliffs at Point Fermin. There is not much in the way of natural beauty in the port town of San Pedro, at the southern end of Los Angeles. Almost everywhere, the views of the Pacific are cluttered by the oil tankers, the container ships, the canneries and the flaming smokestacks that provide the jobs in this working-class town. But at Point Fermin there is a pretty little park where one can hop the crumbling concrete fence, stand at the edge of the cliffs, shut out the life-affirming sounds of dog walkers and picnickers and gaze out upon the Pacific without seeing any of that industrial ugliness. There is a clear view of nothingness from here, and that view is stunning.

Just before graduating from ninth grade, Alicia Hayes, 15, and Amber Hernandez, 14, opted out of adolescence at this spot. On the night of Wednesday, May 22, Amber had a dispute with her parents and ran from the house. Sometime later, she and Alicia went to Point Fermin, climbed the fence and stood amid the wildflowers. They took their shoes off, tied their wrists together with twine and jumped. The next day a beachcomber found their broken bodies on the rocks at water's edge, some 150 ft. below. "Mom and Dad, I love you," read the note Amber left her family. "Brandon and Travis, I love you."

As is the case with most suicides, no one really understands what went through the girls' minds at that moment, and in the end perhaps it doesn't matter. What matters is the wreckage the girls left behind: families and friends grief-stricken and bewildered--and extremely vulnerable. Amber and Alicia were not the first students from San Pedro High School to commit suicide this year; in March, Christopher Mills, a junior, and his girlfriend Heidi Chamberlain, who went to a different school, also leaped to their death from the cliffs by the Pacific. So the second double suicide ignited fear of a chain reaction. (In fact, a few days later a 45-year-old woman jumped from the same spot but survived.) And among school administrators and families in this close-knit community, Amber's and Alicia's deaths also served as a reminder of how astonishingly fraught with danger the teenage years have become in America.

According to new figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, suicide rates are rising steadily for teenagers while declining or holding steady in all other age groups. Between 1980 and 1993, the suicide rate rose 120% for 10-to-14-year-olds; for 15-to-19-year-olds it rose almost 30%. In part this rise can be attributed to the increasing availability of firearms, but in addition, claims Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, "there are more depressed kids." And while the actual numbers of suicides remain quite small--in 1993, 315 10-to-14-year-olds and 1,884 15-to-19-year-olds committed suicide--a 1993 study of 16,000 high school students conducted by the CDC found that an astonishing 1 in 12 said he or she had attempted suicide the previous year.

Among teachers and counselors who deal with teens on a daily basis, such words as crisis and overwhelming crop up repeatedly. Rosemary Rubin, one of two consultants with the Los Angeles Unified School District suicide-prevention unit, says she receives emergency calls about eight-year-olds, and even four-year-olds, threatening to kill themselves. "People don't want to believe that children have problems where they could possibly think about ending their lives, yet this is what's going on," says Rubin, who worked with San Pedro High School in the wake of both sets of suicides. "The crises are hitting right and left, and not only are the schools burned out, so are the crisis teams."

Unraveling Amber's and Alicia's short stories is a difficult task, made harder still by the swirling rumors passed along among the excitable ninth-graders like trading cards. After Chris Mills killed himself in March, crisis teams went to the school but talked mostly with students in his class, the 11th grade. There was no opportunity then to identify Alicia, who knew Mills slightly, as a particular copycat risk. The local press and tabloid-television reporters made much of the fact that both girls hung with a crowd that wore black clothes and black lipstick and listened to gothic music, as if they belonged to some death cult. Their friends think this is ridiculous. "I used to have a class with one of the girls who dressed like that, and she was really nice," says ninth-grader Clarissa Muzzy. "They were just girls who liked to dress in black."

But both girls were in fact known to be troubled--Alicia, in particular, had struggled with depression and drugs--and both had received some counseling. Alicia had run away from home, where she lived with her mother, stepfather and older sister, more than once, and Amber too ran away. According to Amber's father Marty Hernandez, earlier this year the two girls got as far as Santa Monica together and were missing for five days before the police found them.

The transition to high school seemed to hit Alicia particularly hard. In the good old days, says middle school best friend Jennifer Champion, 14, "it was so much fun. We were just always happy. Her favorite symbol thing"--here Jenny sketches on her knee with a fingernail--"was peace, a heart, happiness, harmony, sunshine and then 'flower power.' We'd always write that on our notes." But not long before her death, Alicia told Jenny that she had been hospitalized and had tried to kill herself "tons of other times: she showed me the slit marks on her wrists; she said her stomach had been pumped."

Alicia's parents have confirmed to the local press that their daughter had been hospitalized four times for depression and drug-abuse treatment. She was released from the hospital just three weeks before her death. The school knew of Alicia's problems. Denise Marovich-Sampson, an English teacher who coordinates the "impact" counseling program, which consists mostly of voluntary discussion groups, says Alicia was referred to her, but refused to attend impact sessions. "I have this guilt thing, thinking, Did I do enough? But yeah, I did," says Marovich-Sampson. "If a child is not willing to get help, I can't drag her out of class kicking and screaming."

In the weeks before she took her life, Alicia seemed particularly happy and motivated. Determined to improve her grades, she asked for a new seat in the math class, front and center. After the tragedy, the teacher, Sandra Crosby, and the students were haunted by that empty seat, and after much discussion, one of Alicia's friends volunteered to fill it. Crosby says she wishes she had known earlier that such a personality change is a common suicide-warning sign, perhaps indicating that Alicia had already made her decision to die and wanted to leave people with positive memories of her. "I don't know everything," she says. "I only know the 52 minutes I saw her every day."

Some friends speculate that Amber was simply too nice to let Alicia die alone, and experts say that in double suicides, there is often one dominant, one submissive personality. But again, to the girls' friends this explanation is too simple. "I don't think it's all one person's fault," says Jennifer Champion. The more likely scenario is that the girls confided only in each other--and that each was absolutely the wrong person to help the other break the bonds of depression. "I just wish they'd talked to somebody," says Alicia's friend Michelle Williams, 16.

Famous around school for her mohawk that was pink one day, orange the next, and for her sense of style, Amber "is funny, easy to get along with," says Clarissa Muzzy, still speaking of her friend in the present tense. "She listens to people and speaks her mind." She shone in English class, where, not incidentally, just before her death she had taken the role of Juliet in a class reading. In a two-page autobiography she wrote just a couple of weeks before she died, she said she wanted to be a marine biologist and that the thing she hated most in the world was when people did not accept her for the way she was.

If she was unhappy, Amber's father says, it was with "normal teenage problems": she hated her curfew, balked at her chores and thought her parents were too strict. She had tried marijuana a few times, and her parents immediately sent her to drug counseling. "We didn't throw her in and say, 'Fix her,'" Hernandez says. "We all participated as a family." The day before her death, she proudly told a friend that she had not smoked pot in seven weeks.

Hernandez, an environmental-protection specialist for the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, describes his daughter as a gentle soul. One afternoon they went to look at tidal pools together. The tide had come in, stranding hundreds of sea cucumbers. Amber spent the afternoon rescuing the helpless things. "She was a happy girl," he says. "I don't know what happened." He adds, "My message is to love your kids as much as you can, because you don't know what's going to happen."

There are probably no deep, dark secrets here, just as there is nothing lethal in the culture of San Pedro High, which is no more and no less troubled than the average suburban high school. It is ethnically mixed yet relatively strife-free, with aging buildings and overworked but enthusiastic teachers, many of whom attended San Pedro themselves. The school has been touched by drugs, guns and gang violence, but teachers believe the worst problem is kids who come from troubled and broken homes, kids who cannot or will not communicate with their parents, kids who seem unable to get up again when life's waves knock them down.

In light of the earlier suicides, Amber's and Alicia's deaths hit San Pedro High particularly hard. Cyndy Lum, a psychiatric social worker who was part of the crisis-intervention team, describes the scene the first few days after the suicides hit the 6 o'clock news as "a large-scale psychiatric disaster." Students clustered in hallways weeping; classes sat numb and silent; teachers broke down at an after-school meeting. Says math teacher Crosby: "It was the roughest teaching day I've ever had." Because teenagers--impulsive and susceptible to fashion in all things--are considered particularly vulnerable to copycat behavior when it comes to suicide, counselors made a point of talking with students who had been in each of Amber's and Alicia's classes. Any attempts to memorialize the girls were discouraged; candles and flowers that appeared at the spot where Amber and Alicia ate lunch every day were removed and sent home to the families.

As the crisis workers feared, there were indeed students who were, as Rubin describes it, "on the edge." A few were hospitalized for severe depression, and counselors are still following up with others they have identified as suicide risks. "For a child who isn't thinking clearly, they see this as a way of getting the recognition they don't have in life," says Rubin. "And for many kids death is not real--it's a fantasy concept--so you can say, 'Oh, I'll kill myself and get my picture in the paper.' They don't see that death is final."

Blame is being cast back and forth. Marty Hernandez says he does not understand why the school did not get Amber into impact counseling. San Pedro officials, meanwhile, insist that they are doing all they can, what with budget cuts not only at the school level but in county mental-health services as well. The one school psychologist for 3,100 pupils works "almost full time," according to principal Stephen Walters, but focuses on special-education students. San Pedro's impact counselors are simply dedicated teachers with a little extra training that consists of three to seven days of workshops and lectures, and the program depends on a federal grant that may not survive the budget ax. And there are only two suicide-prevention workers serving the 649,000 students in the Los Angeles school system--which is actually two more than many school districts in the country have.

What is indisputable is that as the 20th century comes to a close, to the three Rs must be added a battery of services, counseling and all-around student care. "This is the last line of defense, high schools," says Mike Booth, the head of San Pedro High's health department. "Fifty percent of my class is from single parents. But society doesn't give us the means to take care of them. We have seven minutes between each period. We're overwhelmed, overwhelmed by family problems that used to get taken care of at home. We're trained, but we're not doctors. We're at a loss." Suicide experts stress that families must be unafraid to seek professional help, and that teachers must take all signs of depression seriously.

Mindful of this year's tragedies, Richard Vladovic, administrator of the San Pedro schools, has just had approval from the school board to hire a full-time person to continue special counseling, not only at San Pedro High but at the middle schools in the area as well. Vladovic (San Pedro class of '62) says he would most like to teach children today that "the true measure of success is how you overcome the obstacles. We need to teach youngsters that failure is not permanent. Suicide is, but failure isn't."

It is that finality that Amber's and Alicia's friends, at an age when they think they are immortal, are now left to make sense of, and which they understand--almost. "It was dumb," says Michelle Williams. "They didn't even get a chance to live--to feel how it is to drive, to grow up and have kids. They're probably saying right now how dumb it was."