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.