Lethal Beauty / The Allure: Beauty and an easy route to death have long made the Golden Gate Bridge a magnet for suicides

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Photos of the Golden gate Bridge. Story on GG Bridge suicides for story, "Lethal Beauty." CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Photos of the Golden gate Bridge. Story on GG Bridge suicides for story, "Lethal Beauty." Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Lethal Beauty / The Allure: Beauty and an easy route to death have long made the Golden Gate Bridge a magnet for suicides 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Editor's Note: The first installment of a series of stories on Golden Gate Bridge suicides, which appeared Sunday, contained material that had appeared in the Oct. 13, 2003, edition of the New Yorker magazine. The story should have attributed quotations from Ken Baldwin of Angels Camp and Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes to the magazine. It also used language nearly identical to that of the magazine to describe the California Highway Patrol's decision to halt the official count of suicides at 997 and to describe the unofficial 1,000th death.



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One-thousand, two-hundred eighteen dead. The lives of families devastated. Sixty-eight years of debate about a suicide barrier. Today, The Chronicle begins a seven-part series looking at the darker side of the Golden Gate Bridge. The conclusion is inescapable: A suicide barrier would prevent deaths. Golden Gate Bridge district directors voted in March to authorize a $2 million feasibility study, which has not yet been fully funded. The stories this week provide the context, background, meaning and a human dimension for the decisions that will follow.

We take it for granted -- those of us who spend our lives here. But the potency of the Golden Gate Bridge, in its symbolism and beauty, is probably unmatched by any other urban structure in the world.

On those halcyon afternoons when fog threads the bridge's harp strings and suspension cables, when clouds settle over the East Bay hills and the sun catches diamonds in the bay, this greatest of vistas exhibits itself proudly: tawny hills of Marin, shimmering bulk of Angel Island, raw beacon of Alcatraz and the lazy, Mediterranean contours of San Francisco.

This is the view, on a good day, that greets the suicide before he jumps -- a panorama enthralling in its harmony of land, sea and sky. Even when the cooling fog blunts the view, the vast majority of jumpers take their last step facing east instead of west toward the Pacific.

The Golden Gate Bridge is the world's No. 1 suicide magnet, in part because it makes suicide so easy. People jump and kill themselves there, an average of 19 a year. In the peak year, 1977, there were 40 suicides. Some dive not expecting obscurity or oblivion but a kind of grace -- a welcoming body of water that inducts the jumper into nature.

"I'd heard the water just sweeps you under," Ken Baldwin of Angels Camp in Calaveras County, who survived his jump in 1985, told the New Yorker magazine.

In fact, there's nothing peaceful in a jump from the bridge. Once a person dives, depending on where he or she jumps, the body plummets 240 to 250 feet in four seconds, traveling about 75 mph, and hits the water with the force of a speeding truck meeting a concrete building. Some die instantly from extensive internal injuries; others drown in their own blood.

The jump is fatal 98 percent of the time. The Chronicle's research indicates that at least 1,218 suicides were reported between the time the bridge opened, on May 27, 1937, and this past Friday. Local mental health experts believe that number could be higher, considering the suicides who jump and go undetected, their bodies floating out to sea.

Three to 1, they're men, according to a recent study by the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California that compiled Marin County coroner's reports from January 1995 to July 2005. Eighty-seven percent are Bay Area residents -- exploding the myth that people flock from around the world to die here.

They range from 14 to 85, with an approximate median age of 41. Some leave suicide notes; most don't. An estimated 26 jumpers have survived, according to San Francisco Suicide Prevention and the Marin County coroner.

Beyond those numbers, it's difficult to draw a collective profile. The first jumper, on Aug. 7, 1937, was Harold Wobber, a World War I veteran. Wobber turned to a stranger on the walkway -- saying, "This is as far as I go" -- and took his last step.

Robert Byther, a 27-year-old Navy veteran, flew from Virginia to San Francisco in December 1980 specifically to jump off the bridge to protest the election of Ronald Reagan as president.

Filomeno De La Cruz, 33, celebrated Thanksgiving with relatives in 1993, then walked his 2-year-old son along the bridge. Around 5 p.m., De La Cruz lifted the child from his stroller, grasped him in his arms and jumped over the guardrail. "He was going through a divorce and custody fight," a homicide inspector said at the time.

Weldon Kees, 40, was a poet and filmmaker who produced KPFA's radio show "Behind the Movie Camera." Kees parked his 1954 Plymouth Savoy at the bridge parking lot on July 18, 1955, left his keys in the ignition and disappeared. His body was never recovered.

Fifty years later, Jonathan Zablotny, a senior at International High School, took his life. "Overall he had more reasons to be happy than to kill himself," wrote Zablotny's friend Patrick Fitzgerald in a letter to the bridge district board.

"He told no one and left no note. All we know is that he left for school Tuesday morning and never got there. That afternoon he was dead."

Tho the dark be cold and blind,

Yet her sea-fog's touch is kind,

And her mightier caress

Is joy and the pain thereof;

And great is thy tenderness,

O cool, grey city of love!

Poet George Sterling wrote those words in 1923, and the late Chronicle columnist Herb Caen was fond of quoting the last line. Sterling's words effuse romantic notions of San Francisco, its generous spirit and the "tenderness" of its residents. In a city defined by loss and impermanence -- settled by gold speculators, razed by earthquake and fire, notorious as an open port where anything goes -- Sterling found forgiveness and redemption, a balm for loneliness.

We like to feel good about where we live -- to believe that San Francisco retains its warmth and charitable heart. But the "cool, grey city of love" has for 68 years neglected an epidemic of death. Whereas officials at the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building and other suicide landmarks recognized a crisis and erected suicide barriers, the Golden Gate Bridge still offers a welcome mat to someone in search of a quick exit.

We sense the tragedy but view it in the abstract, rationalizing the deaths with a laissez-faire attitude: "They have a right to end their lives if they choose." During the months of reporting on this series, the majority of people interviewed voiced this sentiment, often in glib terms. "If they didn't have the Golden Gate Bridge, they'd just kill themselves another way."

Jose Maldonado, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, says suicide "is one of those things people don't talk about, especially when it has to do with matters of pride, especially with people in your own family. That can be extrapolated to society at large. People in San Francisco don't want to talk about suicide in their own city."

Denial is powerful. San Franciscans joke about bridge suicides in the offhand way we poke fun at a losing ball team or a scandal-tinged public official. The suicides themselves are vaguely perceived.

In the '90s, a suicide club was formed to predict the exact date that the 1,000th suicide would jump to his or her death. As the death toll approached, a local disc jockey promised a case of Snapple to the victim's family. In June 1995, trying to stem the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, 20, became the unofficial thousandth. His body was never found after witnesses saw him jump.

Richard Seiden, a suicidologist and professor emeritus of behavioral science at UC Berkeley, remembers a greeting card he found in a gift shop. On the outside was a pen-and-ink drawing of the bridge. On the inside, this sentiment: "Don't jump to conclusions!"

In 1978 Seiden published a study of 515 people who were prevented from jumping off the bridge. He found that only 6 percent went on to kill themselves.

Seiden, now retired, has written of the bridge's "mystical allure" for suicides -- its combination of beauty, lethality, romance and efficiency.

That allure, complex and ultimately mysterious, can be broken down into five factors.

ACCESSIBILITY

For Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention and a passionate advocate for a suicide barrier, accessibility is the biggest factor in making the bridge a magnet for death. "It's something you can accomplish relatively easily," she says, "and that's what makes it so dangerous."

The railing is 4 feet high, and the parking lot is a short distance from the bridge. Within two to five minutes of parking one's car or getting off a bus, one can dive over the railing. No need to buy a gun or to stash pills; none of the bother of hanging or asphyxiation.

Says Meyer, "It's almost like saying, 'If you're a failure, you can always do this.' "

In his original plans, chief engineer Joseph Strauss considered the bridge's potential as a suicide site and designed railings 5 1/2 feet high. On May 7, 1936, a year before the opening of the bridge, Strauss boasted to the San Francisco Call-Bulletin that the bridge was "practically suicide-proof."

"The guard rails," he was quoted as saying, "are five feet and six inches high and are so constructed that any persons on the pedestrian walk could not get a handhold to climb over them. The intricate telephone and patrol systems will operate so efficiently that anyone acting suspiciously would be immediately surrounded. Suicide from the bridge is neither possible nor probable."

By the time the bridge opened a year later, Strauss' promise had evaporated. It's unclear when the plans were modified, but at some point architect Irving Morrow, originally hired to design the entryways and bridge plazas, went to work on the guardrails. Morrow reduced them to 4 feet, and in doing so created a stage for decades of self-slaughter.

Today, after seven failed campaigns to pressure the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District into building a suicide barrier, the bridge remains a nearly foolproof method for suicide. One of this year's fatalities, Lois Anne Houston, was 75 and overweight, but even for her the 4-foot rail was no deterrent.

"Some people already have the Golden Gate Bridge in their mind, in the same way others have a gun in the closet," says Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of a noted book on the psychology of suicide, "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide." "The particular place or means of suicide is obviously highly idiosyncratic, but it's a function of what's available."

FINALITY

Suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

-- from the Anne Sexton poem "Wanting to Die"

Marissa Imrie was a straight-A student at Santa Rosa High School when she jumped off the bridge in December 2001. After her death, Marissa's mother, Renee Milligan, looked on her computer and found that Marissa had researched a Web site on suicide. She also had bought a book, Geo Stone's "Suicide and Attempted Suicide: Methods and Consequences," and learned that a jump from the bridge is far deadlier than suicide methods typically favored by women and girls: Poison is 15 percent effective; drug overdose, 12 percent; wrist cutting, 5 percent.

On Amazon.com, a customer review describes Stone's book as "a cookbook. But instead of teaching you how to make a souffle or Peking Duck, it has recipes for death."

Poison, drugs and wrist slashing are all potentially fatal, but in each case there's a window of time in which victims are open to second thoughts. With death imminent, their lives might seem more valuable or the cost of their death to family and friends too high. So they call 911, a friend or a relative. With a leap from the bridge, second thoughts are useless.

Although some suicides and suicide attempts are carried out with ambivalence -- they're a cry for help, a desperate plea for acknowledgment -- there are those who want only to die. In such cases, the belief that one method of suicide is especially deadly can bring comfort.

"The amount of pain and suffering that leads up to suicide is very hard for people to grasp who haven't been very profoundly depressed," says Jamison, who once made a suicide attempt and later described it in her 1995 book, "An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness." "It's just so incredibly painful. People are really desperate. And one aspect of that desperation is really wanting to die and have a very final way."

THE WERTHER EFFECT

In January 1933, two classmates from a Tokyo school jumped into Mount Mihara, an active volcano on the Japanese island of Oshima. Weeks later, six more leaped into the volcano. Soon tourists were gathering to witness the suicides, which totaled 140 that year, 160 the next. Barriers were erected; it's no longer a suicide destination.

"Various places develop a reputation as suicide landmarks," says suicidologist Seiden. "Hanging trees and lovers' leaps and places like the Golden Gate Bridge start to get a notoriety. They develop a self-propelling momentum."

In 1974, sociologist David Phillips gave a new name to suicide contagion. He called it the Werther effect, taking the name from "The Sorrows of Young Werther," an 18th century German novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The story of a young man's suicide by pistol after a failed romance, "Sorrows" inspired a rash of copycat suicides -- many of whom dressed for death in the style of the novel's tragic hero -- until the book was banned in several countries.

Newspaper and media accounts are believed to contribute to the Werther effect, which is why The Chronicle stopped reporting each Golden Gate Bridge suicide more than 20 years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. Marin County Coroner Ken Holmes said he went to the local media when the number approached 850. "We weaned them," Holmes told the New Yorker magazine. But, he added, "the lack of publicity hasn't reduced the number of suicides at all."

The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York, the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena and the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto were notorious suicide magnets until barriers were erected. Tellingly, when a suicide barrier was appended to the Bloor Street Viaduct -- after 480 deaths in 85 years -- people didn't drift to another bridge and create a new suicide magnet.

"When suicide becomes difficult," Meyer says, "people do not switch to another method. They tend to get help. This is what happened in England when the formula for gas ovens was changed" -- carbon-monoxide levels were reduced -- "and it became harder for people to purchase certain over-the-counter drugs. The suicide rate went down. England has a suicide rate half the size of ours because they're so aggressive about it."

GRANDEUR

Mark Finch, 33, was a tall, high-strung Englishman living in San Francisco. Stylish, gifted and chronically depressed, he was in the process of coming off the antidepressant Effexor when he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge on Jan. 14, 1995. When he died, having left his leather briefcase on the bridge's pedestrian walkway and a number of suicide notes on his office desk, his friends were stunned. Jenni Olson, his co-director at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, recently made a film, "The Joy of Life," that deals in part with Finch's suicide and the bridge's long legacy of death.

Why the bridge and not another form of suicide? "Of course, given his personality, I just thought, 'Oh, how Mark' that it would be so spectacular. He doesn't do anything in a small way," Olson said.

She sent copies of her film to the bridge's board of directors, and believes it influenced the members' decision in March to explore the possibility of a suicide barrier. "The Joy of Life," which played at the Castro Theatre in June, was shot on a 16mm film stock that renders colors in rich, saturated tones and provides physical evidence of the bridge's grandeur. Filmed from below to emphasize its massive bulk and from a distance to capture its elegant Art Deco design and spectacular natural setting, the bridge looks iconic -- staggeringly beautiful.

It's difficult to imagine another man-made structure so perfectly conformed to a setting of exquisite natural beauty. "There is a kind of form to it, a certain grace and beauty," a suicide survivor once told David Rose, a psychiatrist at UCSF Medical School. "There's something aesthetically pleasing about it," said S.I. Hayakawa, the onetime president of San Francisco State who became a U.S. senator in 1976.

Alfred Hitchcock capitalized on the bridge's allure -- and dramatically enriched its mythology -- when he staged a powerful scene in his 1958 thriller, "Vertigo," nearby. Kim Novak, playing the mysterious Madeleine, drops rose petals into the bay at Fort Point -- under the shadow of the giant bridge. Suddenly she jumps in and, in a sweeping gesture of movie-star heroism, Jimmy Stewart dives into the turbulent water and carries out the soaking Novak in his arms.

When glamour and beauty are required for a death site, the Golden Gate Bridge can't be topped. For those who select it for suicide, says Jamison, there's an attraction in "seeing for the last time something that is truly beautiful. Perhaps doing it in a very beautiful, spectacular, dramatic way adds meaning to something that otherwise doesn't have as much meaning as one would like."

The beauty factor is perplexing, Jamison says, because most suicides occur in ordinary places: garages, attics, subway or train platforms. "They're not anything associated in any way with beauty. To me it's quite unusual in suicide literature. Of course, it's a very small percentage of suicides that jump from the bridge. But there is a quality to it that is very haunting."

JOINING THE HERD

Suicide is taboo in most world cultures -- perceived as a sin and affront to God, a callous rebuke to one's family, the ultimate in ingratitude. In America, suicide is often disdained, just like the depression that triggers it, as a lack of moral fiber. "People think depression is like having lung cancer," says Stanford's Jose Maldonado. " 'You did it to yourself. If you weren't so weak, you'd pull yourself up by your bootstraps.' "

In 1959, a Chronicle story on the "enigma" of bridge suicides quoted East Bay psychiatrist Malcolm A. Sowers: "When someone jumps from that bridge, he is, in a way, joining all those who went before. And that's important, I believe, because even in suicide, people don't like to be too far removed from the herd."

Seiden of UC Berkeley dismisses that notion. "Most of the people who are suicidal are so wound up in themselves, so depressed and so unable to see beyond the tip of their nose that the idea of becoming part of this larger congregation wouldn't really appeal to them. They're really stuck in one place, sort of glued into the fact that there's no hope for them, no future, no alternatives. They get a kind of tunnel vision."

Perhaps the bridge's necrology of suicide is tied to the city's tradition of tolerance and nonjudgment, if not connected, as well, to the notion of San Francisco as a city of transplants, people who migrate from other parts of the country to find comfort and acceptance.

Once the seeker reaches land's end, the gateway to the Pacific, does he find what Jack Kerouac called the city's "end of continent sadness"? Finding that San Francisco is like any place -- short on miracles, incapable of erasing the past -- does he give up, believing he's used his last option?

There are no simple answers. Jenni Olson conjectures that suicides choose the Golden Gate Bridge in part to spare their friends and family the horror of discovering their bodies. By jumping off the bridge, and leaving the dirty work to the Coast Guard rescuers and coroners, Olson said, a suicide removes one major aspect of trauma for the survivors.

Whatever the elements that impel a person to jump off the bridge, it's important to remember that every suicide is marked by irrationality. "Suicide is a closed world, with its own irresistible logic," wrote critic and novelist A. Alvarez in "The Savage God," a response to the suicide of a friend, poet Sylvia Plath. "Everything makes sense and follows its own strict rules; yet, at the same time, everything is also different, perverted, upside down."

The majority of suicides, Jamison wrote in "Night Falls Fast," are people suffering from major depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Often they've gone off their medication; in many cases drugs and alcohol exacerbate their disorders. Divorce, reversal of fortune, disease or other crises can precipitate suicide, but these conditions are rarely unaccompanied by underlying mental disorders.

Immediate circumstances can inflame the suicidal mind, Alvarez writes, but "they are like a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight."

In his landmark book on depression, "Darkness Visible," William Styron described his illness as "a howling tempest in the brain," "an unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world." Plath, dead at 30 after sticking her head in a gas oven, described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart."

For a personality in crisis, the accessibility of the Golden Gate Bridge can be the tipping point between life and death. "It's like leaving a row of bottles of poison in front of a baby," says Meyer of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. "And they're all pretty and have bows on them."

The majority of bridge suicides are preventable, she says, because so many are impulsive. Strangely, the greatest stumbling block in the building of a suicide barrier is the attitude of a population that prides itself on open-mindedness.

"I had someone come up to me as I was walking to some hearings and he said, 'They should put up a diving board so those people can jump off it.' I said, 'Now say to me, "They should put up a diving board so my son could jump off of it."'"

MONDAY

Family Grief: A suicide leaves a legacy of anguish.

RESOURCES

CRISIS CENTERS and HOT LINES

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255.

National Suicide Hotline: (800) 784-2433.

Asian Community Mental Health Services, Contra Costa: (510) 970-9750 for information in many Asian languages.

Asian Community Mental Health Services, Oakland: (510) 451-6729 for information in many Asian languages.

Contra Costa Crisis Center: Hot line (24 hours): (800) 833-2900; grief counseling (800) 837-1818.

Crisis Support Services of Alameda County: Hot line (24 hours): (800) 309-2131.

Marin County Family Service Agency, Suicide Prevention and Counseling Services: Hot line (24 hours): (415) 499-1100.San Francisco Suicide Prevention.

Hot line (24 hours): (415) 781-0500.

Linea Apoyo (Spanish-language crisis line): (415) 989-5212 (6 to 10 p.m. Monday-Friday).

Suicide and Crisis Service, Santa Clara County: Hot line (24 hours): (408) 279-3312.

Youth & Family Enrichment Services, San Carlos: Hot line (24 hours): (800) 784-2433.

TO GET INVOLVED

Visit the Psychiatric Foundation of Northern California Inc. at www.pfnc.org for public information and educational programs about mental health.

To learn more about the Golden Gate Bridge Suicide Barrier Study: Visit www.goldengatebridge.org, click on "Current Projects."

To donate to the Golden Gate Bridge Suicide Barrier Study: www.pfnc.org.