He recalls the time Dylan bought an African hand drum after he had seen Raymond playing one. When Raymond saw Dylan's purchase, he joked about its low quality. "Ah, I should have taken you with me!" Dylan told him, his tone insecure. Raymond sensed that same insecurity another time, when he teased Dylan about how small his bong was — "You call that a bong?" They laughed about it. But the next time Raymond came over, "there was a huge bong sitting there."
"Good things always happened to him but he never thought he was good enough," says Raymond. "Like he couldn't really enjoy it and never really stopped to smell the roses. He was on a journey of self-realization, and he achieved so much. But he always seemed to feel, 'I coulda done better.'"
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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Maybe he didn't have the strength to keep climbing. It sometimes hits big-city, upwardly mobile young professionals particularly hard.
"He's in that age group that nobody really pays attention to," says Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. "Everybody thinks they're happy. They're just getting started. They have their whole lives ahead of them. They're young. They look like they should be happy. But there's a lot of pressure there."
He was out there on that ledge for so long. Maybe he was thinking about those jeering faces looking up at him, Raymond says. Dylan seemed to embody San Francisco — an ambitious transplant with a bleeding heart. Raymond recalls more than one occasion when he had to drag Dylan down the street to keep him from giving another dollar to another panhandler. "He looked at people who didn't have anything and couldn't help but try to help them," Raymond says. "He had a deep sympathy for others.
"When you have a belief that humanity at its core is good and then you have people tell you to jump — see someone laughing at your pain — the only way to shut them up is to jump," Raymond continues. "Something deep in him told him that humanity wasn't all it was cracked up to be. He wouldn't have jumped off that building if people weren't yelling 'Jump.' No fucking way."
Dylan's mother is convinced this was the case.
"With all my heart, with all my soul, I do not believe that he went on that ledge to kill himself," Kathie says. "I believe he wanted someone to help him. He was looking in the crowd."
Heartbroken and not knowing what else to do, she has sued the San Francisco Police Department for not trying to silence the spectators. Yelling "jump!" at a man on a ledge violates the California penal code, she notes, and the officers had a legal obligation to detain those who yelled up at him. A man on a ledge is in a fragile state, ambivalent to the thought of death, says Clayton. Like a dinghy lost at sea, he can drift one way or the other — to life or to death — depending on the waves' direction.
"Dylan was the type of person that if enough people were telling him to jump, he would almost do it just to show them that he could," says Andrew. "He was standing on that ledge, looking down at all those people yelling 'Jump! Jump!' and I think he felt like he was backed into a corner, felt like he had no choice but to jump."
Of course, Dylan had already hit some breaking point by the time he climbed out on that ledge. So even those closest to him will never know what it was like for him out there.
Nobody can reach Dylan. He's been on the ledge for 45 minutes now. And for 45 minutes, those strangers 100 feet below have kept the Internet updated, connecting through images and 140-character messages. But not a single person can connect to Dylan. No one is any closer to knowing what is going through his head, even as those strangers are writing the final chapter of his life.
The police are tying to reach him. They've finally gotten into the building. Trained suicide negotiators are rushing to the sixth floor. At least one officer is already attempting to talk to him. "Get the hell down from there!" he yells from the ground.
There is a distance greater than the 100 feet separating the ledge and the ground. The spectators see an event, through which they package and discuss their own emotions. "We detach ourselves from what is going on," says Karen Sobel-Lojeski, a professor in the Technology and Society department at Stony Brook University. "We're talking to ourselves, basically. We're consuming our experience through our own filters."
Those filters are not impregnable. Certain experiences can leak through and touch the heart. The people in the crowd will feel the pain later, when social media sites turn into de facto grief counseling sessions and the suicide prevention hotline rings off the hook, as something that seemed unreal on the other side of the lens becomes more real than many people can handle.
For now it is only spectacle, a novelty during the walk home from school, or the afternoon shopping, or the sightseeing, or the wait at the bus stop.
