THE LAST THING KAY SAID on the phone a little before midnight was unsettling enough—“Bryan, I love you. I got to go. It was nice to know you”—but now she wouldn’t answer her cell. She wasn’t in her Queen Anne apartment. She wasn’t in the park they’d strolled through hand in hand days earlier. He didn’t know where she was, he just knew he had to find her.
Finally around 1:30am, Sunday, January 16, 2011, after pounding on his girlfriend’s door, after multiple calls went straight to voice mail, Bryan Wilson, a 29-year-old sustainable-business consultant, dialed 911.
A Seattle police cruiser met him at the corner of Queen Anne Avenue and Roy minutes later. “Do you have any reason to believe she might hurt herself or others?” asked officer Kurt Alstrin. “Yes,” Bryan said. “She’s severely depressed.”
Soon every police radio in Seattle crackled with the name. Kaylan Rose Campbell, 25 years old. Green eyes. Red or auburn hair. Five feet eight inches tall.
What the radio message couldn’t convey was that few people who knew Kay had ever met anyone more intelligent. Or more beautiful. That she dabbled in six languages and had traveled halfway around the globe by the time she was 20. That she could hear any tune once and play it back on a keyboard. That she laughed so loud you could feel it in your spine.
Nothing in that call to all police units could explain how Kaylan Campbell had been struggling for the past few months, how she had told those closest to her that she hated herself, that she was convinced she was a bad person, that she felt trapped.
“Any idea where she might be?” Officer Alstrin asked.
Bryan recalled the background noise he’d heard during their last phone conversation. Wind. Traffic. He thought of their conversations during the past week.
“Where do you think she is?” the officer pressed.
“I think she’s at the bridge,” Bryan said. “The Aurora Bridge.”
He knew the words were loaded, that they sounded preposterous. Someone’s distressed and I automatically assume she’s going to jump off the Aurora Bridge?
But the cliche exists for a reason. The bridge, site of more than 230 suicides, is second in the U.S. only to San Francisco’s Golden Gate in number of jumpers. So dire had the suicide problem become—especially for the vocal minority who lived and worked below the bridge—that the Washington State Department of Transportation was nearly finished constructing a $5 million suicide fence. The project had been stalled, first by historic preservationists who wanted to keep the nearly 80-year-old bridge looking exactly as it did when it was erected in 1932, and later by engineering setbacks and unforeseen noise complaints.
If Kaylan Campbell was on the span connecting Queen Anne to Fremont, staring into the darkness 15 stories down—at either the Ship Canal or its banks—she had joined hundreds of others who had come to the bridge for the same reason since before it was even completed.
Wednesday, January 20, 1932, H. N. McKeehan, a recently divorced shoe salesman from West Seattle, traveled to the unfinished George Washington Memorial Bridge, drank a jigger of bromide, and jumped. He died instantly on the ground 65 feet below.
THE CROWD POURED DOWN SECOND Avenue on the morning of February 22, 1932, and waved small American flags—a river of red, white, and blue gushing toward the new steel structure on the north end of town. At exactly 10am church bells chimed throughout Seattle, commemorating the moment 200 years earlier when George Washington was born.
By 2pm, the throng of fedoras and ringleted hairdos—nearly 20,000 people—reached the bridge, the dedication of which was to be the national highlight of the bicentennial celebration. The 2,945-foot-long, 70-foot-wide cantilever span—officially named the George Washington Memorial Bridge—soared over Lake Union and was the last link in the Pacific Highway, which ran from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Dignitaries from Canada and Mexico, the mayor of Seattle, and Washington’s governor gave speeches.
Twelve trumpets sounded. Three thousand miles away in the White House, President Herbert Hoover, two years into presiding over the largest financial crisis in U.S. history, pressed a telegraph key at exactly four minutes before 3pm. The message surged across the continent in seconds, triggering a siren at the bridge, a 21-gun salute, and streams of water from fireboats. An enormous American flag unfurled 500 feet above the crowd.
The excitement of the day may have overshadowed the shoe salesman’s suicide a month earlier, but Seattleites were soon reminded of the bridge’s deadly pull. Within three weeks, police were ordered to stand guard at the bridge to thwart a Fremont woman who had threatened to jump off. A month after that, the span saw its second suicide—a man leapt off the bridge onto the train tracks on 34th Street.
In September 1934, responding to three or four suicides in that year alone, the Seattle Daily Times editorial page pleaded with the city council, asking “that a very high fence with incurved top be built to surmount the guardrails for the full length of the Aurora Bridge.”
The body count mounted. On February 3, 1938, six years after the bridge dedication, 26-year-old Alex Cohen, owner of a sausage casing company, became the 20th person to jump to his death. The next day, the Times again brought up the fence, this time on the front page: “Anti-Suicide Fence Urged on Aurora Bridge.” A poll revealed that a majority of Seattleites supported the creation of a suicide barrier.
The decades ticked by. The death toll reached 105 in 1973. By the 1980s officials had stopped keeping track. This may be because the official count was lost as the duty of recording suicides transferred from agency to agency. But a new attitude about reporting suicides had emerged: Releasing such numbers and the details of the deaths, the theory went, only encourages more suicides. The names of the deceased disappeared from the news stories. Then the stories themselves vanished.
Published: July 2011
