Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death

He looks around in disgust. He sees the police officers spread around the block, heads tilted upward. "Why aren't they doing anything about this?" he wonders.

At first, Beto doesn't think the man is going to jump. The man appears hesitant. He paces across the ledge. He rocks back and forth, glancing at the pavement below. He peers into the crowd, as if looking for somebody. He climbs back through the window into his apartment before returning a few seconds later. He creeps to the edge and the crowd gasps. Then he inches back.

Photos courtesy of Kathie Yount

“I believe he wanted somebody to help him,” says Dylan’s mother, KathieYount. “He was looking in the crowd.”

Photos courtesy of Kathie Yount

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Beto makes his way through the crowd and finds a spot beside a man in a blue button-down shirt and a woman in black sunglasses. He overhears the pair chatting with one of the policemen. Turns out these two spectators are off-duty cops from Contra Costa County. They don't think he's going to jump, either.

"We see this all the time," Beto hears the man in the blue button-down tell the uniformed officer. "He ain't gonna do it. He's just wasting our time. Get it over with already."

Beto turns on his camera. He begins filming the people around him. He is one of many capturing the scene. Just another voyeur, they might think. But no one knows about the connection he feels to the man on the ledge.

He wishes he could levitate and tell the man that it's going to be okay. All the man needs, Beto thinks, is a single hand to reach out and pull him back.

He doesn't know this man personally. But he does know what it's like to stand on the edge.

As he looks up, Beto's thoughts turn 20 years back, to when he was 16 and staring at that oncoming train. He dived out of the way at the last second. And then his mind jumps forward a few months, to a church retreat in the foothills, when he snuck off during the night to climb the tallest hill he could find. It was windy, he remembers, but he was nimble and strong enough to reach the top. He could see the lights of Stockton and Modesto in the distance.

That hill had a cliff, and Beto walked to the edge. He was overcome with pain — pain from problems at home and at school. His toes nudged forward until there was no more ground left before him. The hurt was too much. He closed his eyes, spread his arms wide, and leaned forward.

That's when a gust of wind surged into his chest. It held him up. He felt like he was flying. He took a step back and tumbled to the ground. Tears were flowing down his cheeks when his three buddies found him sitting in the dirt. They couldn't comprehend what he had just experienced. He had been saved, he thought to himself, by God or fate or something. The circumstances of his life and, of all things, the barometric conditions of the moment had intersected to bring him to and take him from the edge. He never thought of killing himself again.

Beto snaps back to the present. His pulse quickens. There is little wind in San Francisco today.

Dylan's friends wonder if they could have saved him. They wonder how a man with no recorded history of depression, a man who seemed to have it all, could hide his pain so well. They wonder how their rock, their steady hand, had broken. It happened so suddenly. When a few of them gather in his apartment hours after his death, they find a receipt for mountain bike parts he had just ordered.

They wonder if they should have seen signs. But those who commit suicide don't necessarily show signs along the way. Some just suddenly crack. "Many people who die with suicide have this break with reality," says Paula Clayton, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. "People get suddenly sick with mania." The signs of this breakdown are obvious — hallucinations, intense paranoia, stripping off clothes, deep apathy, bursts of hostility. But by that time, it can be too late if there is nobody around to intervene.

Dylan's loved ones will never know the answers, but they will try to find them anyway, because it's all they can do. They desperately search their memories for signs. The smallest anxieties — the ones we experience every day that ease with time — stick out, because there is nothing else to work with. And the theories bloom endlessly.

Maybe it had something to do with the fight he had gotten into with his girlfriend on Valentine's Day. That would be unfair to her, though. After a suicide, every loved one feels guilt. But while Dylan will not be able to control how his final image is framed, she has the luxury of the living, the ability to ask that her name not be mentioned, that she not be linked online to this terrible event.

Maybe Dylan was overwhelmed by the burden of limitless ambition. He was, after all, a striver, never complacent with his lot. Raymond calls it "that unsatisfied, restless soul he had."