a friend’s band, the Grinders, were playing at My Father’s Place, a Long Island club. That night the guys dedicated a song, “The Kids in the Basement,” to the four teens from Bergenfield: This is for the suicide kids. In the weeks following the suicide pact, a number of bands in the tri-state area also dedicated songs to them. Their deaths had hit close to home….
A week or two after the suicide pact, The Village Voice assigned me to go to Bergenfield. Now this was not a story I would’ve volunteered for…. But one day my editor at the Voice called to ask if I wanted to go to Bergenfield. She knew my background—that I knew suburbia, that I could talk to kids. By now I fully embraced the sociologist’s ethical commitment to the “rights of the researched,” and the social worker’s vow of client confidentiality. As far as suicidal teenagers were concerned, I felt that if I couldn’t help them, I didn’t want to bother them.
But I was really pissed off at what I kept reading. How people in Bergenfield openly referred to the four kids as “troubled losers.” Even after they were dead, nobody cut them any slack. “Burnouts,” “druggies,” “dropouts.” Something was wrong. So I took the opportunity.
From the beginning, I believed that the Bergenfield suicides symbolized a tragic defeat for young people. Something was happening in the larger society that was not yet comprehended. Scholars spoke ominously of “the postmodern condition,” “societal upheaval,” “decay,” “anomie.” Meanwhile, American kids kept losing ground, showing all the symptoms of societal neglect. Many were left to fend for themselves, often with little success. The news got worse. Teenage suicides continued, and still nobody seemed to be getting the point.
Now, in trying to understand this event, I might have continued working within the established discourse on teenage suicide. I might have carried on the tradition of obscuring the bigger picture, psychologizing the Bergenfield suicide pact, interviewing the parents of the four youths, hounding their friends for the gory details. I might have spent my time probing school records, tracking down their teachers and shrinks for insights, focusing on their personal histories and intimate relationships. I might have searched out the individual motivations behind the words left in the note written and signed by each youth on the brown paper bag found with their bodies on March 11. But I did not.
Because the world has changed for today’s kids. We also engaged in activities that adults called self-destructive. But for my generation, “doing it” meant having sex; for them, it means committing suicide.
“Teenage suicide” was a virtually nonexistent category prior to 1960. But between 1950 and 1980 it nearly tripled, and at the time of the Bergenfield suicide pact it was described as the second leading cause of death among America’s young people; “accidents” were the first. The actual suicide rate among people aged 15 to 24—the statistical category for teenage suicide—is estimated to be even higher, underreported because of social stigma. Then there are the murky numbers derived from drug overdoses and car crashes, recorded as accidents. To date, there are more than 5,000 teen suicides annually, accounting for 12 percent of youth mortalities. An estimated 400,000 adolescents attempt suicide each year. While youth suicide rates leveled off by 1980, by mid-decade they began to increase again. Although they remained lower than adult suicide rates, the acceleration at which youth suicide rates increased was alarming. By 1987, we had books and articles detailing “copycat” and “cluster” suicides. Teenage suicide was now described as an epidemic.
Authors, experts, and scholars compiled the lists of kids’ names, ages, dates, and possible motives. They generated predictive models: Rural and suburban white kids do it more often. Black kids in America’s urban teenage wastelands are more likely to kill each other. Increasingly, alcohol and drugs are involved. In some cases, adults have tried to identify the instigating factor as a lyric or a song—Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne. Or else a popular film about the subject—the suicide of a celebrity; too much media attention or not enough.
Some kids do it violently: drowning, hanging, slashing, jumping, or crashing. Firearms are still the most popular. Others prefer to go out more peacefully, by gas or drug overdose. Boys do it more than girls, though girls try it more often than boys. And it does not seem to matter if kids are rich or poor.
Throughout the 1980s, teenage suicide clusters appeared across the country—six or seven deaths, sometimes more, in a short period of time in a single community. In the boomtown of Plano, Texas. The fading factory town of Leominster, Massachusetts. At Bryan High School in a white, working-class suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. A series of domino suicides among Arapaho Indian youths at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Six youth suicides in the county of Westchester, New York, in 1984; five in 1985 and seven in 1986.
Sometimes they were close friends who died together in pacts of two. In other cases, one followed shortly after the other, unable to survive apart. Then there were strangers who died alone, in separate incidents timed closely together.
The Bergenfield suicide pact of March 11 was alternately termed a “multiple-death pact,” a “quadruple suicide,” or simply a “pact,” depending on where you read about it. Some people actually called it a mass suicide because the Bergenfield case reminded them of Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, where over 900 followers of Jim Jones poisoned themselves, fearing their community would be destroyed.
As experts speculated over the deaths in Bergenfield, none could recall a teenage suicide pact involving four people dying together; it was historically unique.
I wondered, did the “burnouts” see themselves as a community under siege? Like Jim Jones’ people, or the 960 Jews at Masada who jumped to their deaths rather than face defeat at the hands of the Romans? Were the “burnouts” of Bergenfield choosing death over surrender? Surrender to what? Were they martyrs? If so, what was their common cause?
Because the suicide pact was a collective act, it warrants a social explanation—a portrait of the “burnouts” in Bergenfield as actors within a particular social landscape.
For a long time now, the discourse of teenage suicide has been dominated by atomizing psychological and medical models. And so the larger picture of American youth as members of a distinctive generation with a unique collective biography, emerging at a particular moment in history, has been lost.
The starting-off point for this research, then, is a teenage suicide pact in an “upper-poor” white ethnic suburb in northern New Jersey. But, of course, the story did not begin and will not end in Bergenfield.
Yes, there were specific sociocultural patterns operating in Bergenfield through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible. Yes, there were particular conditions which influenced how the town reacted to the event. Yes, there were reasons—that unique constellation of circumstances congealed in the lives of the four youths in the years, weeks, and days prior to March 11—that made suicide seem like their best alternative.
Given the four youths’ personal histories, their losses, their failures, their shattered dreams, the motivation to die in this way seems transparent. Yet, after the suicide pact, in towns across the country, on television and in the press, people asked, “Why did they do it?” But I went to Bergenfield with other questions.
This was a suicide pact that involved close friends who were by no accounts obsessed, star-crossed lovers. What would make four people want to die together? Why would they ask, in their collective suicide note, to be waked and buried together? Were they part of a suicide cult?
If not, what was the nature of the social bond that tied them so closely? What could be so intimately binding that in the early morning hours of March 11 not one of them could stop, step back from the pact they had made to say, “Wait, I can’t do this”? Who were these kids that everybody
