An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

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       The Owl Bar, date unknown

      In a 1914 article on the many causes of human fear, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall described those who are afraid they will suddenly jump from a high place with no reason:

      Very common is the impulse, usually very sudden, to hurl oneself down from towers, windows, roofs, bridges, high galleries in church or theater, precipices, etc., and not a few grew rigid, livid, clenched their hands and teeth, clung almost convulsively to railings or bystanders, or had to be held by their friends from plunging off in order to escape the tension by “ending it all” or “to see how it would feel” to fall or get the “beautiful sensation” of it. . . . The pure suicide motive in these cases is often a sudden eruption, it is a good opportunity to die and have it all over in a moment. There is little doubt, however, that this jumping off instinct in the young and old may lead to death without any real plan of suicide.

      For many years, the Belvedere was one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, and accessible to anyone with enough money to book a room for the night. Unsurprisingly, it has had its fair share of jumpers. For example, on February 22, 1954, thirty-three-year-old Dr. Marvin Alpert registered at the hotel with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Lorraine. The couple had been married for just over five years, and had a young daughter. Normally, they lived at the Park Drive Manor, a large apartment-hotel in Philadelphia, but the previous October, Lorraine had been admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, suffering from depression.

      Dr. Alpert, a respected ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, arrived in Baltimore that morning and went directly to the clinic to pick up his wife to spend the day with her. The weather was chilly, and Mrs. Alpert was in no mood for sightseeing, so it makes sense that the couple spent their conjugal visit at the Belvedere. Dr. Alpert was planning to stay overnight in Baltimore and to return to Philadelphia the following morning. Lorraine had to be back at the clinic by six p.m. About an hour before her curfew, Dr. Alpert left his wife in their fifth-floor room while he went to make a purchase at a nearby drugstore. When he returned, the room was cold, and his wife was nowhere in sight.

      The window was standing open. Alpert ran to it, looked over the edge, and saw Lorraine lying unconscious on the roof of the hotel kitchen four stories (about fifty feet) below. An ambulance was called and a crowd gathered. Mrs. Alpert was barely conscious when medics retrieved her from the kitchen roof; they took her to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was found to have two broken legs and a fractured skull. She died two hours later.

      Mrs. Alpert, with her history of depression, was clearly at risk, but on the whole, jumpers rarely show the usual warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. Compared to those who use other methods, jumpers are less likely to have known histories of mental illness. They have fewer previous suicide attempts. Jumping from a high place offers ease, speed, and the certainty of death, all of which encourage impulsive action. In general, however, perhaps because it is so resolutely final and demands a certain steely bravado, jumping accounts for only 2 percent of suicides worldwide. In the United States, firearms are the method of choice for men, and overdoses for women. In Europe, where firearms are more difficult to come by, the noose, for men, replaces the gun.

      Another reason why the proportion of jumpers is so low is that the world’s highest suicide rates are found in extremely poor countries—for example, Guyana, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and Mozambique—places in which it is very rare to find high buildings that are accessible to ordinary people. As a result, those in rural agricultural areas resort to the method used by around 30 percent of the suicides committed in the world every year, and one of the most painful: drinking pesticides.

      As might be expected, jumpers are much more common in densely populated cities known for their skyscrapers. The cities with the most high-rise buildings are also the cities with the highest proportions of jumping suicides. In Singapore, for example, 72 percent of suicides are jumpers; in Hong Kong, the figure is 50 percent; in New York, 23 percent. If you live in a town with no buildings higher than five stories, you are advised to select an alternative method. Suicide guidelines from the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die advocacy group, suggest that if your town has few buildings higher than four or five floors, jumping might not be the best way of taking your own life, since such relatively low leaps are not always fatal. If you have no choice but to jump from a fourth or fifth floor, the guidelines suggest, you should try to land on your head in order to maximize the chances of brain hemorrhage—the most frequent cause of death for suicidal jumpers. Gruesome as this may sound, according to physicist and philosopher Sascha Vongehr, in a blog entry devoted to the science of suicide, the half-second delay between brain receptor activity and awareness of experience means that the jumper dies before the impact of the landing. This speculation, obviously, cannot be confirmed.

      While six floors should be enough to kill you, a drop of at least ten floors is advisable. In such circumstances, you do not have to concern yourself about what part of your body hits the ground first, assuming you have an adult body weight and that you land on a solid surface. Of course, there have been bizarre and miraculous exceptions—people have survived falls from airplanes without parachutes, while others have died after tripping over their shoelaces.

      Yet are not all individuals exceptions to the statistical average? The French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed so. In his famous book on the subject, he wrote that “each victim of suicide . . . gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.” To make sense of the death of Rey Rivera, we must ask what the detective Auguste Dupin in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” describes as “the proper question in cases such as this,” which is “not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’ ” For detailed particulars, the best place to begin is the autopsy report.

      According to this document, Rivera hit the ground feet first. He had rather less external damage than one might expect after a fall of 118 feet, no doubt because his fall was broken around twenty feet from the ground, when he crashed through the roof of the former swimming pool. Still, the report makes nightmarish reading. These are the injuries found on Rivera’s body: two cuts to the forehead, one of which is four inches long; fractures to the СКАЧАТЬ