The Final Leap (10 page)

Even though the body of their daughter, seventeen-year-old Casey Brooks, whose jump is described in the prologue of this book, was never found, John and Erika Brooks were spared the uncertainty that the Whitmers, Maria Martinez, and others have experienced. Because Casey's leap was captured on bridge cameras, the Brookses know what happened—or at least they're pretty sure they do. John Brooks says now that there's a small part of him that wonders whether the girl seen on film actually was Casey or another girl who happened to look like her. Maybe Casey is still alive, he says, “in Brazil or somewhere.” He knows that that's just the hope of a despairing parent, and that the truth is she's dead, so he forces it from his mind.

He and his wife haven't filed a missing persons report because they don't see a reason to. They did decide to get tattoos, though, like Dayna Whitmer, to honor Casey. Each made the decision before informing the other, and both were surprised to find that they shared the same thought. “The attraction of a tattoo,” Erika tells me, “is that it's permanent and always with me. Unlike a necklace that can break or a T-shirt with Casey's picture on it that wears out over time, her tattoo is part of me forever, even after I die.”

Deciding to get a tattoo was only the first step. John and Erika had to decide what it would be of, where it would be on their body, and who would do it. They went to several tattoo parlors, but left almost immediately, dismayed by the conditions. Coincidentally, a few weeks later they traveled to Los Angeles so that John could be interviewed on the
Dr. Phil Show
about the Golden Gate Bridge and Casey's death. They met a tattoo artist backstage and felt that he was the right person. He ended up being so moved by Casey's story that after he created the design on paper, cut it out, and put it in place so that they could see what it would look like, he did the actual tattoo work in their home.

Erika's tattoo is on the back of her right hand, where she can always see it. It's of a flowering lupine plant with nine leaves, representing nine levels of wisdom. Above it, on her right ring finger, is a mission blue butterfly, actual size, which is only about half an inch. It's an endangered species native to the California north coast, feeds off of lupine, and was a favorite of Casey's. John's tattoo consists of the words “I Love Casey” on each bicep, one in Chinese and the other in Sanskrit.

The Brookses readily admit that after Casey died, their lives lost all meaning. Nothing mattered anymore. No one could hurt them worse than they had been hurt already. At one point Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner whose office does the autopsies of Golden Gate bridge jumpers and notifies next of kin, feared that John Brooks would kill himself. Brooks was so raw, so brittle, so devastated. Holmes asked Brooks if he ever thought of suicide.

“Every day,” Brooks replied.

“You know you can't,” Holmes said. Too many other people needed him.

“I know I shouldn't,” Brooks said.

What has helped John and Erika Brooks the most is the support they've received from Casey's friends, who continue to stay in touch with them, as well as the support they've been able to provide to these young and impressionable youths. Together, they're helping each other cope with a tragedy that shouldn't have ever happened.

Since Casey jumped, hundreds of poignant messages have been posted on her Facebook remembrance page.

“I had this mad intense dream about you last night, it was sweet. it made me think a lot. nobody is like you, and it's not fair. but I woke up happy even though I missed you more than usual.”

“I put a ‘I heart Casey' on my window on the driver's side. [Casey's parents had these made and gave them to her friends.] Now folks think I have a boyfriend. Seriously, I think I'm going to post those bumper stickers on every stop sign around SF's Civic Center. You will always be remembered!'

“It was a beautiful day out today. The sun was shining, and there was a glimmer of hope. That made me think of you.”

“You might not be here, physically, but I feel as if part of you is always with me.”

John and Erika Brooks continue to read the postings, learning things that shed a small amount of light on Casey's death. For instance, a year before she jumped, when Casey was working as a clerk at a Williams Sonoma store, another employee leaped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Roxanne Makoff was Casey's best friend. In September 2008 she testified before the Bridge District board of directors. “If you have ever thought about killing yourself, please raise your hand,” she began, then paused. “If you did not just raise your hand, you are lying,” she said. Casey “did not think through the consequences of her actions, and I'll be the first to tell you that what she did was selfish and thoughtless, but I am also telling you today that with a barrier, she would still be among us. Casey had issues, don't get me wrong, but her issues only became life or death when she realized the accessibility of the Golden Gate Bridge.” Makoff challenged the belief that someone who's determined to die will resort to any possible means:

Casey would have never slit her wrists, hanged herself, or overdosed on pills to kill herself.… Her only method of suicide was the Golden Gate Bridge. I have proof of this because just three weeks before her death, I was riding in her car with her across the Golden Gate Bridge when I casually asked her, “If you were to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Call me stupid, call me messed up, call me whatever you want, but in this day and age, a question like this one isn't uncommon. Casey's response: “The Golden Gate Bridge, of course. So beautiful, so easy, so clean.” I agreed.… The night of Casey's death, she completed all of her homework, studied for all of her tests, and carried on normal conversation with us, her friends. Somehow after all of this normality, Casey decided her life wasn't worth living anymore. It was early in the morning, a lack of sleep had gotten the best of her, and the cold weather dampened her spirits and somehow in her mind she decided it was time to end her life.… Build a suicide barrier. It is imperative. The loss of a life to suicide does not affect only the family and the close friends. It affects an entire community.… Save our loved ones who are similar to Casey Brooks.

Sarah Barr grew up with Casey, and lived on the same street. She said that she was opposed to a suicide barrier before Casey Brooks died and now felt that one was critical to prevent other deaths. In her testimony, she stated,

This is just wrong. Casey should have graduated, she should have gone to college, she should be moving into her dorm right now, but she is not.… We live in an affluent area, and there are pressures to dress well, get good grades, excel at something—whether it be sports, art, debating—it has to be something. We all feel like escaping that pressure at times. That the bridge is so easy to jump from is just wrong. I'm 17, and I've known three people who have jumped. There is something wrong with that.… I want a barrier so that every teenager has the opportunity to see what there is to live for.”

Bridge District officials had heard heartfelt testimony before. Families and loved ones of victims had testified. Responders and helpers had testified. Coroner Ken Holmes had testified, as had Kevin Hines, a bridge jump survivor. All spoke articulately and passionately about the need for a suicide barrier. None had quite the same impact as the testimony of Casey Brooks's friends, however. According to Tom Ammiano, a member of the Golden Gate Bridge District board for twelve years, “When the young people came out, everybody was moved.” Even Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco at the time (now lieutenant governor of California), who previously had made public statements opposing a suicide barrier, changed his mind after hearing Casey's friends speak.

“The strange thing about the bridge,” says filmmaker Eric Steel, whose 2005 documentary movie
The Bridge
focused on Golden Gate Bridge suicides (and is discussed in detail in chapter 7), “is that when someone dies there, there's this big splash and within minutes it's like nothing ever happened. All the ripples go away. And the traffic keeps moving and the pedestrians are walking and the water's going under the bridge. But for the families, that ripple keeps going forever.”

That's as good a description of the impact of suicide in general and Golden Gate Bridge suicides in particular as I've ever heard. When a loved one dies by any means, there's a hole in your heart that can only be mended by time and a strong support system. With suicide, the hole is bigger, the pain tends to be greater, and the recovery period usually is much longer. With the Golden Gate Bridge, there's the added dimension that society seems to be condoning the death by doing nothing to stop it.

Four days after his father, Charles Gallagher Sr., a successful businessman, jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, his son followed him. The younger Gallagher, twenty-four, was a premed student at UCLA. He drove his father's car to the bridge and jumped from nearly the identical spot. His suicide note was short: “I am sorry … I want to keep Dad company.”

Stories of victims underline the immeasurable human potential that disappears with each suicide. Vince Mulroy, who jumped in 2009, was the starting wide receiver for Stanford in the Blue-bonnet Bowl thirty years earlier, after being a star decathlete and football player at Newport Harbor High School in southern California. Mulroy also was a first-team Academic All-American, recipient of the university's prestigious J. Walter Sterling Award, and a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship. Bill Walsh was his coach. After attaining an MBA from Harvard Business School, Mulroy had a successful career in real estate. He also was an active volunteer with two youth groups. At age fifty-two, suffering from depression and chronic back pain, the latter due to football injuries and a later car accident, he jumped from the bridge, leaving a wife and two teenage children.

Roy Raymond was another casualty. A self-made millionaire, Raymond started Victoria's Secret, the lingerie company, after being embarrassed to buy his wife a slip in a regular department store. When he sold the company, he invested in a high-end children's toy store that failed, then in a children's bookstore that also lost money. Although friends said that Raymond was eternally optimistic and unfazed by business failures, he must have been more depressed than they knew. In August 1993, he drove his Toyota to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote notes for his wife and their children, then jumped.

Duane Garrett jumped, too. A longtime Democratic Party fundraiser and personal friend of former Vice President Al Gore, Garrett managed political campaigns for Walter Mondale, Bruce Babbitt, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein. He also was a political analyst at a television station in San Francisco. Mere hours before he jumped, he left a message at the station saying that he couldn't do the next day's show. His car was found in a parking lot near the toll plaza. His body was found floating underneath the Golden Gate Bridge after it was spotted from above.

Dr. Phil Holsten was valedictorian of his high school class in Modesto, graduated from the University of California San Francisco Medical School, completed his residency at Stanford, and was a doctor at California Pacific Medical Center. An avid bicyclist, Holsten told Sarah Cherny, his fiancée and a fellow physician, that he was going to ride in the Marin Headlands on his day off. Instead, according to two witnesses, around 11
A.M.
he stopped halfway across the bridge, dismounted, leaned his bike against the railing, placed his helmet over the handlebars, and jumped without any hesitation. It was 2004; he was thirty-three years old.

A year later, Cherny testified before the Bridge District board. As reported by
San Francisco Chronicle
reporter Joan Ryan, Cherny told board members that Holsten gave no warning signs. “He had already paid for a trip to Guatemala that he was taking with me and my parents,” she said. “I found out later he had been planning a surprise birthday party for me in two weeks.… If there was a barrier, I would have seen him at home that night instead of on a metal gurney after his autopsy.”

Cherny's father also testified. “You may think it can never happen to you,” Robert Cherny told Bridge District board members. “I am here to tell you that it can.” The elder Cherny taught history at San Francisco State University and was on the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board. He referred to the latter capacity in appealing for a suicide barrier on the bridge. “I sometimes get to vote on saving buildings,” he said. “You get to vote on saving lives.”

Sarah Cherny noted that two of the primary arguments against a suicide barrier—that it will cost too much and that it will ruin the view—were the same arguments that were raised seventy years earlier when people objected to building the bridge itself. Eventually those arguments were overcome—or at least cast aside—by a stronger, prevailing opinion that the cost was worth it and the view would be preserved.

Today, no one questions the cost of the Golden Gate Bridge, although commuters do question the cost of rising bridge tolls, which subsidize the Bridge District's bus and ferry service (the bridge itself was paid off in 1971). And the view continues to be breathtaking, among the most spectacular in the world. In hindsight it's easy to see that concerns about the cost and the view were unfounded.

The same will be true when a suicide deterrent is erected on the Golden Gate Bridge. The lives that are saved will be worth the price, and the view won't be affected in any significant way.

It's a rare occurence to hear someone say that a suicide deterrent mars the appearance or views of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, or other architectural wonders of the world. People are so used to them that they hardly even notice their presence or if they do notice they don't bemoan the fact that they're there. The barrier is accepted as part of the structure— unfortunate perhaps, but necessary. Tourism isn't affected.