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."