The casual way he went from hugging his girlfriend to pulling out a gun. So I had travelled to this rundown district to see if I could put some meaning to his sudden end.
I walked up the path and entered the foyer. I had already been here, in a sense. It was the same, a decade on. The scuffed municipal floor, the grey metal light, the lift doors. A man in a tightly wound-down hooded top walked in. Did he know Paris? He did not answer me. Then a young African American woman came in, but she was also silent. This area had seen too much violence for people to start talking to a white guy with a notepad, so I walked back out into the wind.
School was breaking up, and, as I retraced my steps down the weed-ripped pathway, a fight broke out. The kids crowded around, screaming and jostling. A white teacher – all of the children were black – strode over, and there was a sharp bark of rebuke. The children dispersed, their laughing, pecking voices causing birds to take flight.
An older man, solid and confident, with a flat cap and tattoos, his poodle on a leash, walked past. I asked if he remembered the shooting.
‘Oh. That cat. Yeah, it was shocking,’ he said. ‘I had a friend who was downstairs when it happened – there was blood all over the floor. Like it was fake, you know. But the girl, the girl just carried on upstairs and didn’t know. It’s still being talked about.’
His name was Wayne Newton. He had lived here for forty years, ever since he was eight, and ran a barber shop down the way. It used to be crazy around here. A person like myself hanging around back then – and he pointed a finger at me and mimed pulling the trigger. I asked more about Paris.
‘Yeah. You hear about him even now. “Have you seen what’s on the internet? Some cat shot himself in the Projects.” They don’t realise he did this ten years ago.’
Paris had lived a hard life. His parents had both died of AIDS by the time he was twelve. He was an aspiring rapper who used the name Paradice. But Wayne did not know much more and so he shook my hand and told me he had a 9mm gun for himself because, hell, you needed it here once. Then his dog saw a squirrel and shivered with excitement and pulled at the leash, and Wayne was gone.
I walked the streets, around and around, the apartment block at my centre, asking if people remembered the lonely death. But Wayne was the only one who had heard of this young man, or was saying he had, at least. The mothers in the children’s after-hours playgroup, each wall lined with rainbows, clicked their tongues and said they knew nothing. The police stood outside the school gates, guns on their hips and suspicion on their minds, and crossed their arms. They asked me why I was asking such questions, and I walked away from them as if guilty of something.
The woman at the housing association gave me the telephone number of a press officer on a slip of torn paper. I crunched it into a small ball and let it drop into a bin. Press officers don’t talk about such things. And I walked back out into the fading evening and watched the flight of lonely city birds as they sliced through the air in a solitary dance and realised that Paris’s name was long lost to these streets. His death was so famous and yet so forgotten in the very place where he died.
A slice of time can be a saving grace when it comes to thinking about suicide. One study of survivors of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the US found 40 per cent had contemplated suicide for less than five minutes beforehand.13
Such a rapid shift in emotions means one thing: that the way someone chooses to end their life is important. If someone reaches for a gun, they usually don’t get a second chance. If they reach for pills, they often do. Over 99 per cent of people shooting themselves in the head die, whereas only 6 per cent of people slashing their wrists or popping pills end up killing themselves.14 And it’s been shown, repeatedly, that those who survive a suicide attempt usually don’t later die by suicide.
This link between the availability of means of killing yourself and the chances of a successful suicide is powerfully illustrated in the way that the American-born poet Sylvia Plath ended her life in the UK. Sylvia, despairing of the lifelong depression that had hounded her for thirty years, which she called ‘owl’s talons clenching my heart’, killed herself in 1963. In the velvet quiet of the morning she had taken sheets of tin foil and handfuls of wetted tea towels and lined the doors and windows of her kitchen, so as to protect her sleeping children next door. Then she put her head in the oven and turned on the gas. By 4.40 a.m. Sylvia Plath had escaped the weight of her darkness.
At the time ovens in England used coal gas; something that contained carbon monoxide in a lethal dose. In the late 1950s, so easy was it to stick your head in the oven in England nearly half of all suicides were gas deaths, some 2,500 a year. Seeing the problem, the government acted, and soon gas companies stopped using poisonous coal gas. What was known as the ‘execution chamber in everyone’s kitchen’ was removed.
What did the suicidal do instead? It seems most carried on living. England’s suicide rate dropped precipitously by one-third and then stayed at that level.15 Many of those who gassed themselves apparently did so impulsively. As Scott Anderson wrote in a New York Times article: ‘In a moment of deep despair or rage or sadness, they turned to what was easy and quick and deadly.’ Removing the oven slowed the process down; an accessible exit from the agony of despair became suddenly less so.16
If this is true for gas ovens, then why not for guns? Studies have shown that just keeping a gun unloaded and storing its ammunition in a different room significantly reduces the odds of that gun being used in a suicide; it seems that there was some correlation between access and lethal action. So I contacted one of America’s leading experts on suicide – Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University – to find out more. We spoke over a crackling line, but what he said was clear.
‘There is probably no psychiatrist who couldn’t tell you they know patients who have thought about ending their lives,’ he said, his voice dipping in and out on the call, ‘who then, with the treatment for depression or alcoholism or whatever, went on to live thirty or forty years without a recurrence of that kind of suicidal ideation. Suicidal ideation is often situation-specific and often transient.’
He talked about the people who throw themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco – one of the world’s most popular sites for suicides. The bridge stands 75 metres above the cold water of the Frisco bay. After a fall of four seconds, jumpers hit the surging surface at 75 miles an hour, a speed that usually breaks their backs. Over 95 per cent of the jumpers die from the drop alone, the rest from drowning or hypothermia. The chances of dying are about as sure as using a gun, so the bridge attracts those who see a flying death being better than a blood-splattered one, with a peak of ten suicides there in one month alone.
‘Years ago, back in the late ’70s, a professor at Berkley collected information regarding over 500 people who attempted to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge but were restrained,’ Paul went on. ‘He found the vast majority, almost 90 per cent of them, were still alive twenty-five years later, and only about 5 per cent had subsequently committed suicide, 5 per cent dying of natural causes. OK, the rate of suicide was higher than the general population, but 90 per cent of them were still alive an average of a quarter of a century later.’
His words made me think about Paris. Was it inevitable he was going to kill himself? If he had not been able to get a gun, would he have wandered down to the dark, slick spread of the Hudson River and drowned himself instead? Or would he have waited for the next lift to the top floor and thrown himself into the yielding air and felt, for a brief second, like he was flying?
These were questions that I had sought an answer to, not in the US, but back when I was in Switzerland visiting the Small Arms Survey.
