Word: pedro
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...take the path of least resistance, to give it all up for the void--it is easy to see why one might choose to go by leaping from the cliffs at Point Fermin. There is not much in the way of natural beauty in the port town of San Pedro, at the southern end of Los Angeles. Almost everywhere, the views of the Pacific are cluttered by the oil tankers, the container ships, the canneries and the flaming smokestacks that provide the jobs in this working-class town. But at Point Fermin there is a pretty little park where...
...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 of a chain reaction. (In fact...
...receives emergency calls about eight-year-olds, and even four-year-olds, threatening to kill themselves. "People don't want to believe that children have problems where they could possibly think about ending their lives, yet this is what's going on," says Rubin, who worked with San Pedro High School in the wake of both sets of suicides. "The crises are hitting right and left, and not only are the schools burned out, so are the crisis teams...
There are probably no deep, dark secrets here, just as there is nothing lethal in the culture of San Pedro High, which is no more and no less troubled than the average suburban high school. It is ethnically mixed yet relatively strife-free, with aging buildings and overworked but enthusiastic teachers, many of whom attended San Pedro themselves. The school has been touched by drugs, guns and gang violence, but teachers believe the worst problem is kids who come from troubled and broken homes, kids who cannot or will not communicate with their parents, kids who seem unable...
...light of the earlier suicides, Amber's and Alicia's deaths hit San Pedro High particularly hard. Cyndy Lum, a psychiatric social worker who was part of the crisis-intervention team, describes the scene the first few days after the suicides hit the 6 o'clock news as "a large-scale psychiatric disaster." Students clustered in hallways weeping; classes sat numb and silent; teachers broke down at an after-school meeting. Says math teacher Crosby: "It was the roughest teaching day I've ever had." Because teenagers--impulsive and susceptible to fashion in all things--are considered particularly vulnerable...