Word: alicia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Unraveling Amber's and Alicia's short stories is a difficult task, made harder still by the swirling rumors passed along among the excitable ninth-graders like trading cards. After Chris Mills killed himself in March, crisis teams went to the school but talked mostly with students in his class, the 11th grade. There was no opportunity then to identify Alicia, who knew Mills slightly, as a particular copycat risk. The local press and tabloid-television reporters made much of the fact that both girls hung with a crowd that wore black clothes and black lipstick and listened to gothic...
...both girls were in fact known to be troubled--Alicia, in particular, had struggled with depression and drugs--and both had received some counseling. Alicia had run away from home, where she lived with her mother, stepfather and older sister, more than once, and Amber too ran away. According to Amber's father Marty Hernandez, earlier this year the two girls got as far as Santa Monica together and were missing for five days before the police found them...
...transition to high school seemed to hit Alicia particularly hard. In the good old days, says middle school best friend Jennifer Champion, 14, "it was so much fun. We were just always happy. Her favorite symbol thing"--here Jenny sketches on her knee with a fingernail--"was peace, a heart, happiness, harmony, sunshine and then 'flower power.' We'd always write that on our notes." But not long before her death, Alicia told Jenny that she had been hospitalized and had tried to kill herself "tons of other times: she showed me the slit marks on her wrists; she said...
...Alicia's parents have confirmed to the local press that their daughter had been hospitalized four times for depression and drug-abuse treatment. She was released from the hospital just three weeks before her death. The school knew of Alicia's problems. Denise Marovich-Sampson, an English teacher who coordinates the "impact" counseling program, which consists mostly of voluntary discussion groups, says Alicia was referred to her, but refused to attend impact sessions. "I have this guilt thing, thinking, Did I do enough? But yeah, I did," says Marovich-Sampson. "If a child is not willing to get help...