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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.