SUICIDE'S SHADOW

• Share

(3 of 5)

In the weeks before she took her life, Alicia seemed particularly happy and motivated. Determined to improve her grades, she asked for a new seat in the math class, front and center. After the tragedy, the teacher, Sandra Crosby, and the students were haunted by that empty seat, and after much discussion, one of Alicia's friends volunteered to fill it. Crosby says she wishes she had known earlier that such a personality change is a common suicide-warning sign, perhaps indicating that Alicia had already made her decision to die and wanted to leave people with positive memories of her. "I don't know everything," she says. "I only know the 52 minutes I saw her every day."

Some friends speculate that Amber was simply too nice to let Alicia die alone, and experts say that in double suicides, there is often one dominant, one submissive personality. But again, to the girls' friends this explanation is too simple. "I don't think it's all one person's fault," says Jennifer Champion. The more likely scenario is that the girls confided only in each other--and that each was absolutely the wrong person to help the other break the bonds of depression. "I just wish they'd talked to somebody," says Alicia's friend Michelle Williams, 16.

Famous around school for her mohawk that was pink one day, orange the next, and for her sense of style, Amber "is funny, easy to get along with," says Clarissa Muzzy, still speaking of her friend in the present tense. "She listens to people and speaks her mind." She shone in English class, where, not incidentally, just before her death she had taken the role of Juliet in a class reading. In a two-page autobiography she wrote just a couple of weeks before she died, she said she wanted to be a marine biologist and that the thing she hated most in the world was when people did not accept her for the way she was.

If she was unhappy, Amber's father says, it was with "normal teenage problems": she hated her curfew, balked at her chores and thought her parents were too strict. She had tried marijuana a few times, and her parents immediately sent her to drug counseling. "We didn't throw her in and say, 'Fix her,'" Hernandez says. "We all participated as a family." The day before her death, she proudly told a friend that she had not smoked pot in seven weeks.

Hernandez, an environmental-protection specialist for the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, describes his daughter as a gentle soul. One afternoon they went to look at tidal pools together. The tide had come in, stranding hundreds of sea cucumbers. Amber spent the afternoon rescuing the helpless things. "She was a happy girl," he says. "I don't know what happened." He adds, "My message is to love your kids as much as you can, because you don't know what's going to happen."

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 to get up again when life's waves knock them down.