Because the world has changed for today’s kids. We also engaged in activities that adults called self-destructive. But for my generation, “doing it” meant having sex; for them, it means committing suicide.
“Teenage suicide” was a virtually nonexistent category prior to 1960. But between 1950 and 1980 it nearly tripled, and at the time of the Bergenfield suicide pact it was described as the second leading cause of death among America’s young people; “accidents” were the first. The actual suicide rate among people aged 15 to 24—the statistical category for teenage suicide—is estimated to be even higher, underreported because of social stigma. Then there are the murky numbers derived from drug overdoses and car crashes, recorded as accidents. To date, there are more than 5,000 teen suicides annually, accounting for 12 percent of youth mortalities. An estimated 400,000 adolescents attempt suicide each year. While youth suicide rates leveled off by 1980, by mid-decade they began to increase again. Although they remained lower than adult suicide rates, the acceleration at which youth suicide rates increased was alarming. By 1987, we had books and articles detailing “copycat” and “cluster” suicides. Teenage suicide was now described as an epidemic.
Authors, experts, and scholars compiled the lists of kids’ names, ages, dates, and possible motives. They generated predictive models: Rural and suburban white kids do it more often. Black kids in America’s urban teenage wastelands are more likely to kill each other. Increasingly, alcohol and drugs are involved. In some cases, adults have tried to identify the instigating factor as a lyric or a song—Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne. Or else a popular film about the subject—the suicide of a celebrity; too much media attention or not enough.
Some kids do it violently: drowning, hanging, slashing, jumping, or crashing. Firearms are still the most popular. Others prefer to go out more peacefully, by gas or drug overdose. Boys do it more than girls, though girls try it more often than boys. And it does not seem to matter if kids are rich or poor.
Throughout the 1980s, teenage suicide clusters appeared across the country—six or seven deaths, sometimes more, in a short period of time in a single community. In the boomtown of Plano, Texas. The fading factory town of Leominster, Massachusetts. At Bryan High School in a white, working-class suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. A series of domino suicides among Arapaho Indian youths at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Six youth suicides in the county of Westchester, New York, in 1984; five in 1985 and seven in 1986.
Sometimes they were close friends who died together in pacts of two. In other cases, one followed shortly after the other, unable to survive apart. Then there were strangers who died alone, in separate incidents timed closely together.
The Bergenfield suicide pact of March 11 was alternately termed a “multiple-death pact,” a “quadruple suicide,” or simply a “pact,” depending on where you read about it. Some people actually called it a mass suicide because the Bergenfield case reminded them of Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978, where over 900 followers of Jim Jones poisoned themselves, fearing their community would be destroyed.
As experts speculated over the deaths in Bergenfield, none could recall a teenage suicide pact involving four people dying together; it was historically unique.
I wondered, did the “burnouts” see themselves as a community under siege? Like Jim Jones’ people, or the 960 Jews at Masada who jumped to their deaths rather than face defeat at the hands of the Romans? Were the “burnouts” of Bergenfield choosing death over surrender? Surrender to what? Were they martyrs? If so, what was their common cause?
Because the suicide pact was a collective act, it warrants a social explanation—a portrait of the “burnouts” in Bergenfield as actors within a particular social landscape.
For a long time now, the discourse of teenage suicide has been dominated by atomizing psychological and medical models. And so the larger picture of American youth as members of a distinctive generation with a unique collective biography, emerging at a particular moment in history, has been lost.
The starting-off point for this research, then, is a teenage suicide pact in an “upper-poor” white ethnic suburb in northern New Jersey. But, of course, the story did not begin and will not end in Bergenfield.
Yes, there were specific sociocultural patterns operating in Bergenfield through which a teenage suicide pact became objectively possible. Yes, there were particular conditions which influenced how the town reacted to the event. Yes, there were reasons—that unique constellation of circumstances congealed in the lives of the four youths in the years, weeks, and days prior to March 11—that made suicide seem like their best alternative.
Given the four youths’ personal histories, their losses, their failures, their shattered dreams, the motivation to die in this way seems transparent. Yet, after the suicide pact, in towns across the country, on television and in the press, people asked, “Why did they do it?” But I went to Bergenfield with other questions.
This was a suicide pact that involved close friends who were by no accounts obsessed, star-crossed lovers. What would make four people want to die together? Why would they ask, in their collective suicide note, to be waked and buried together? Were they part of a suicide cult?
If not, what was the nature of the social bond that tied them so closely? What could be so intimately binding that in the early morning hours of March 11 not one of them could stop, step back from the pact they had made to say, “Wait, I can’t do this”? Who were these kids that everybody called “burnouts”?
“Greasers,” “hoods,” “beats,” “freaks,” “hippies,” “punks.” From the 1950s onward, these groups have signified young people’s refusal to cooperate. In the social order of the American high school, teens are expected to do what they are told—make the grade, win the prize, play the game. Kids who refuse have always found something else to do. Sometimes it kills them; sometimes it sets them free.
In the 1980s, as before, high school kids at the top were the “preps,” “jocks,” or “brains,” depending on the region. In white suburban high schools in towns like Bergenfield, the “burnouts” are often the kids near the bottom—academically, economically, and socially.
To outsiders, they look tough, scruffy, poor, wild. Uninvolved in and unimpressed by convention, they create an alternative world, a retreat, a refuge. Some burnouts are proud; they “wave their freak flags high.” They call themselves burnouts to flaunt their break with the existing order, as a form of resistance, a statement of refusal.
But the meaning changes when “burnout” is hurled by an outsider. Then it hurts. It’s an insult. Everyone knows you don’t call somebody a burnout to their face unless you are looking for a fight. At that point, the word becomes synonymous with “troubled loser,” “druggie”—all the things the press and some residents of the town called the four kids who died together in Tommy Olton’s Camaro.
How did kids in Bergenfield become “burnouts,” I wondered. At what point were they identified as outcasts? Was this a labeling process or one of self-selection? What kinds of lives did they have? What resources were available for them? What choices did they have? What ties did these kids have to the world outside Bergenfield? Where did their particular subculture come from? Why in the 1980s, the Reagan years, in white, suburban America?
What were their hopes and fears? What did heavy metal, Satan, suicide and long hair mean to them? Who were their heroes, their gods? What saved them and what betrayed them in the long, cold night?
And what was this “something evil in the air” that people spoke about? Were the kids in Bergenfield “possessed”? Was the suicide pact an act of cowardice by four “losers,” or the final refuge of kids helplessly and hopelessly trapped? How different was Bergenfield from other towns?
Could kids be labeled to death? How much power did these labels have? I wanted to meet other kids in Bergenfield who were identified as “burnouts” to find out what it felt like to carry these labels. I wanted to understand the existential