Word: bergenfield
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Matt Reiser had a date with Cheryl Burress last Tuesday night in Bergenfield, N.J., near New York City, but at 6:30 Cheryl called to cancel. "We can't get together tonight," she told Reiser. "We're going to visit Joe." Reiser thought he knew what she meant. Joe Major, a friend of Cheryl's, had fallen 200 ft. to his death off the Palisades cliffs along theHudson River last September in what police considered an alcohol-related accident, and Reiser figured that Cheryl was planning to visit Major's grave that night, as she had many times before. Reiser...
Instead, Cheryl, 17, and her sister Lisa, 16, went driving around the Bergenfield area with two companions, Thomas Olton, 18, and Thomas Rizzo, 19. At about 3 a.m., the teenagers stopped at an Amoco station and bought $3 worth of gas for Olton's brown Camaro. They asked if they could take the hose from the station's automobile vacuum cleaner, but the attendant refused...
...short drive from the gas station to Foster Village apartments, a housing complex. The place was well known. Garage No. 74, vacant at least a month, had been serving as a hangout where groups of Bergenfield teenagers came to drink and to smoke marijuana. The youngsters drove into the dark garage, shut the door and locked it. They left the car idling, its windows open. Then they sat back and waited...
More immediately worrisome to parents in comfortable, middle-class Bergenfield (pop. 25,600) is what psychologists call the cluster effect. "After a suicide, there is always an increase" in copycat deaths, says Herbert Nieburg, a psychologist in nearby Westchester County, N.Y., where six boys from the area killed themselves in separate incidents over a four-month period in 1984. The impulse to imitate a suicide can be powerful, especially among adolescents, who tend to romanticize adventure and recklessness. "Kids see that this is a glamorous way to die, a way to get a lot of attention that they couldn...
...Bergenfield...