Suicides in Public Places Traumatic to Witnesses

After Eric Hall, his father and two teenage sons rescued a high school girl who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, they continued on their sailboat ride around San Francisco Bay but in a stunned silence, punctuated by brief conversations about the girl, how she was doing and the possible reasons for her jump.


"She's the same age as my boys," Eric Hall of Walnut Creek told me in an interview in April 2011. "We were just trying to get our heads around it."

I recount this conversation as I wondered about the people who may have witnessed a young Concord woman take her own life by intentionally jumping from the third-floor patio at Nordstrom Thursday afternoon.
Walnut Creek police say the woman, identified as Jessica Almaraz, 29, was by herself when she jumped just before 2 p.m. Thursday. She landed near the sidewalk of South Broadway and Mt. Diablo Boulevard, police said. Almaraz was pronounced dead at the scene.

Were those who may have witnessed this young woman's death traumatized in similar ways to Eric Hall and his family? It's possible. In The Final Leap, his book about Golden Gate Bridge suicides, John Bateson, the former executive director of the Contra Costa Crisis Center, describes the emotional impact on the classmates of the boy who jumped from the bridge but survived. 

The class was visiting the bridge on a school field trip when the boy jumped. "While the jumper was being treated for broken bones, many of his classmates were in shock and needing mental health services. Undoubtedly, it will be a long time before they forget the horror they witnessed," Bateson wrote. 

To suddenly watch someone try to take their own life can lead to degrees of emotional fall-out, ranging from bad dreams, to sleep problems, to depression that causes you to become isolated or to shut down emotionally. You might also be plagued by flashbacks of the event. This is according to Catherine Greenleaf, author of the book, Healing the Hurt Spirit: Daily Affirmations for People Who Have Lost a Loved One to Suicide. On her blog, Healing from Suicide Grief, she writes: 


There are, unfortunately, instances in which a person dies by suicide in a public arena. If you have witnessed the suicide of a stranger in a public place, what should you do? Should you just continue on as you were before and brush the incident off? After all, you never met the person in question and don't even know the person's name. 

There is the time-worn adage, "a witness to violence is a victim of violence." Suicide is a form of self-inflicted violence and witnessing a suicide, whether you know the person or not, can be extremely traumatic.


She advises witnesses who are experiencing any of the above symptoms to seek help from a therapist who specializes in bereavement. 


Meanwhile, if you or someone you know is struggling with feelings of depression or suicidal thoughts the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free, round-the-clock support, information and resources for help. The number is 800-273-8255. 

Is a Japanese suicide fad coming to the East Bay suburbs?

As the Mayor of Claycord notes in his report on the likely suicide of an 18-year-old Pleasant Hill man Thursday, the manner in which he took his own life—by mixing together chemicals and exposing himself to the toxic fumes—is becoming increasingly common.

According to the Contra Costa Times, Marcus Dominic Flamiano mixed toilet boil cleaner and lime sulfer, a commonly used insecticide, and shut himself in the bathroom of a Golf Club Road apartment. Those chemicals combined produced hydrogen sulfide. That was the odor that emergency responders detected and that prompted a shelter-in-place and the response of hazardous materials specialists.

This method of “detergent suicide” has become the subject of worldwide news reports, and according to this 2008 Wired report, this suicide fad—if you can call it that—apparently originated in Japan. This photo shows Japanese police officers in protective gear entering an apartment in southern Japan in April 2008. A Japanese girl had gassed herself to death by mixing laundry detergent with cleanser, creating fumes that sickened 90 people in her apartment house. As Wired said:

A suicide technique that mixes household chemicals to produce a deadly hydrogen sulfide gas became a grisly fad in Japan last year. Now it’s slowly seeping into the United States over the internet, according to emergency workers, who are alarmed at the potential for innocent causalities.


At least 500 Japanese men, women and children took their lives in the first half of 2008 by following instructions posted on Japanese websites, which describe how to mix bath sulfur with toilet bowl cleaner to create a poisonous gas. One site includes an application to calculate the correct portions of each ingredient based on room volume, along with a PDF download of a ready-made warning sign to alert neighbors and emergency workers
to the deadly hazard.

This report notes instances of "detergent suicides" in the United States in the past year:

--In August 2008, a 23-year-old California man was found dead in his car behind a Pasadena shopping center. The VW Beetle’s doors were locked, the windows rolled up and a warning sign had been posted in one of the windows. Police and firefighters evacuated the shopping crew before a hazmat crew in chemical suits extracted the body and began cleaning up the grisly scene.

--In December 2008, emergency workers in Bartow County, Georgia, found a similar scene: inside a car—along with a body—were two buckets containing a yellow substance. A note on the window said "Caution" and identified the chemical compound by name.

Now, do we add Marcus Dominic Flamiano and his death in Pleasant Hill's Briarwoods Apartments to this list?