Public Influence: The Immortalization of an Anonymous Death

By Albert Samaha

published: January 02, 2013

Cover design by Andrew J. Nilsen.

---

Turn on the computer.

Open Twitter.Something catches your eye.

Man on 3rd floor ledge posing in his skivvies

A twitpic, date-stamped 3:18 p.m. on Feb. 16, 2010, shows a grainy figure, wearing nothing but blue boxer shorts, standing outside the tall arched window of an off-white brick building. More tweets roll in.

someone's standing on top of the forever 21 building downtown sf. Wowww

man trying to kill himself in Union Square. He's standing on a ledge three stories up.

Omg there's a guy standing on top of forever 21 bout to commit suicide!

wtf?!? there's a guy looking like he might jump from a ledge on market and fifth. so scary

I'm watching a guy stand on top of a building down town. He's a jumper. Jesus help him!

Refresh the page.

oh shit! he jumped! wtf!!!

Just saw a guy commit suicide off of forever 21 Omg this man just committed suicide and jumped off the building across the street from my job in downtown SF

Did I really just walk by someone jumping to his death off the Bank of America building at Powell and Market!?

Dude some one just jumped off a building by my job. Hella crazy

Twitter posts, Facebook statuses, Flickr comments, Yelp reviews of the Forever 21 store. Nearly 200 messages appear, shocked, angry, amused, detached.

I was shopping in Union Square and unfortunately witnessed this horrific sight.

I woke up this morning, and my twitter had been hacked. Then I was harassed for hours, && then saw the suicide man. Sheesh, session ::))

hadda watch a guy jump off a fourth floor ledge

Today was a strange day at work. Suicide across the street, awkward customers... Ohhh Tuesdays!

This guy clearly was waiting for help or a positive message from the crowd... They had plenty of time to stop it.

I was there and felt sickened for this man's life... wasn't sure if he wanted to jump... I feel that the crowd's actions encouraged him to jump.

The grisly photos show up on Flickr. The body ... the two policemen standing beside it ... the crowd in the background ... the craning necks of people hoping to catch a peek. Comments and views accumulate. Friends share with friends. The tale of the jumper works up the food chain of online communication, from social media to blogs to local news outlets. The images and descriptions spread like a schoolyard rumor, rippling outward from network to network.

Online, the dead man lives on. He is part meme, part current event, part campfire lore — a spectacle thrown into a virtual world filled with spectacle, a click away from "Call Me Maybe" parodies and cats who look like Hitler, dispatches from Syria and clips of people trying to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon. Permanently etched into history, he is The Man Who Jumped Off the Forever 21 Building.

---

A crowd gathers, absorbing foot traffic from Market Street, from the BART station down the stairs, and from the cable car turnaround. Young women carrying shopping bags, tourists holding maps and cameras, local drifters in tattered beanies and coats, commuters waiting at the bus stop, suited men on lunch break — they all trickle in. Hundreds of eyes watch the figure above them.

An ambulance arrives on the scene, and parks with its lights and engine off. Two dozen policemen stand guard, clearing out the sidewalk space directly beneath the building. Like everyone else here, the officers stare up at the ledge. Life is on pause.

Vendors selling handcrafted spoons and knit hats turn their heads for a glance. A production crew shooting a Verizon commercial has stopped filming. A group of breakdancers has turned off the boombox.

"Yo, isn't that the dude who bummed a cig off us?" one of the dancers asks his crew.

"Damn," one of them responds.

Some people look on silently, hands over mouths. A teenage girl in a sundress wipes tears from her eyes. A circle of high school-age kids debate whether a fall from that height would be fatal. A woman in a pantsuit talks into her phone, excitedly describing the scene. Others peck away at keypads. More phones pop up above the mass, angling for a snapshot. A light buzz of chatter hums along, punctuated by a shout.

"Jump!"

Heads turn, seeking out the class clown in the sea of faces. Laughter rising all around, compressed snickers and knee-slapping roars.

In between chuckles, a man in a blue button-down blurts, "He said 'Jump!'"

His female companion in black sunglasses replies with an enthusiastic cackle, "That's awful!"

The shouts come every few seconds.

"Do it already!"

"Idiot!"

A few people occasionally call "Don't do it!" But they are outnumbered.

"Stupid motherfucker!"

The shouters feed off each other, rewarded by the satisfying chorus of chuckles.

"Just do it!"

Nobody tries to stop them. Not their fellow bystanders. Not the cops.

"Jump!"

From the street 100 feet below the ledge, the man barely seems real. He is nondescript, nothing more than white skin with a mild tan, a fit build, and shaggy blond hair. He is a faceless blur. He is anonymous, but will be defined by his final act.

---

The man on the ledge is named Dylan Yount. He is 32 years old, and his life is more than his death. Behind him, past the arching window, is his home, apartment 606 at 10 Cyril Magnin. It is filled with unpacked boxes. He is unknown, standing up there in this city. But 2,000 miles to the east, there is a town where everybody knows him.

Harrisburg is a rural patch of land in the middle of Missouri, bisected by a country highway, connected through gravel roads, and home to 266 residents. In many ways, Dylan was a product of his hometown. He spent his childhood climbing trees and playing tag in his vast, woody backyard. He dreamed of one day becoming a firefighter, like his friend Andrew Gray's dad. As a teen, he spent his weekends four-wheeling, fishing, and deer hunting.

His mother, Kathie, was a single mom, an uncommon sight in Harrisburg. She ensured that Dylan would never be short on activities or father figures. He took Taekwondo lessons, rising to black belt. As an Eagle Scout, he once made a sundial out of rocks and scraps of bronze. He mastered the saxophone and often spent his high school lunch hours jamming in the music room with friends.

The older he got, the more he stood out. In a town of conservatives, he inherited his mother's progressive outlook. Kathie, an English teacher at the high school, also passed down her brains.

"He was very intelligent," says Andrew. "And popular. Everybody knew him. He was sort of a clown, too, always cracking jokes in the classroom."

In his graduating class of 33 students, Dylan was valedictorian. He made the National Honor Society. While most of his friends moved on to the local junior college, Dylan enrolled at the University of Missouri, where he lived at the Alpha Kappa Lambda house and graduated with a degree in business administration. He took a marketing job for a tech company in St. Louis. But by the time he got laid off two years later, in 2001, he was itching to see more.

"There's nothing for me here anymore," he told his friend Wendy Isaacs. "It's just too small."

Wendy, who had settled in Walnut Creek, suggested he come out to San Francisco. So he did. He was instantly infatuated. Back in Harrisburg that Christmas, Dylan hung a cable car ornament on the tree. He also brought with him a cable car trolley bell and a picture of a cable car ripped from a tourist guide of the cable car turnaround. He decided to move to San Francisco.

He got a job selling phone books for AT&T. He explored the city, surfing its waters, biking the surrounding mountains, hitting the bars. There were Dave Matthews Band concerts and Jack Johnson shows, beautiful women and good food.

"He was down for anything, always looking for a thrill," says Raymond St. Martin, who first befriended Dylan when they worked together at AT&T. "He loved San Francisco. He was drawn to the music and the scene and the people and the fashion and the outdoors and the hiking. He was a farm boy excited to be in the city."

The city repaid him for his devotion. He moved up the professional ranks, eventually reaching a six-figure salary. He fell in love with a beautiful girl who worked in technology. He bought a BMW. He filled his closet with designer threads, which he hung on clotheslines after washing because he was worried the dryer would ruin the fabric.

And throughout, Dylan remained close to his people. He was at the hospital when Wendy gave birth to each of her kids. When Raymond was reeling from an argument with his girlfriend, Dylan put an arm on his shoulder, a drink in his hand, and, soon enough, a smile on his face. He was soft-spoken, but always sure of himself. A steady hand to lift you up whenever you needed it.

"I went through a couple of tough breakups and he was always a shoulder to cry on," says Andrew. "You could always express emotion to him, didn't have to hide anything. I've never seen him waver. He was always the rock."

His friends couldn't have been happier for his success.

"He had his dream car, his dream job, and his dream girl," says Raymond. "Things were trending up for him."

In the summer of 2009, Dylan embarked on an extended European trip with his girlfriend. They spent the next six months skiing the Alps and swimming the Spanish coast.

Back in San Francisco, they moved in together — a spacious penthouse overlooking the cable car turnaround. The boxes were still unpacked when she left for her first day back at work on Feb. 16, 2010.

On this day, Dylan's life seems as picturesque as those cable cars spinning outside his window.

---

Beto Lopez also found his dreams in San Francisco. He came from a small town in the Central Valley to pursue a career as a filmmaker, and here he is on Market Street ready to shoot a group of break dancers. But the dancers are not dancing. They are staring up at a man standing on the ledge above the Forever 21 building. And now so is Beto. "Jump!" he hears someone shout. "Do it already!"

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.

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."

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.'"

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.

The police officers reach Dylan's door. It is locked and they can't get in. In his last moments, Dylan's only contact with the world comes in the form of shouts from those strangers. "Jump! ... Idiot! ... Just do it! ... Stupid motherfucker!"

Dylan sees a mass of tormentors. But not all of those strangers are cruel. Most are scared and concerned and sympathetic. They communicate as much in their tweets. But Dylan doesn't know this. All he hears are the taunts and the laughter, that most primal and vulgar sort of human communication. If more spectators had told him "Don't do it!" he might have been saved.

Or it might not have changed a thing.

He looks down at the faces. Maybe he sees the crowd getting bigger. Maybe he understands they are all watching him, waiting.

---

A crowd has gathered around the breakdancers. It's a little past 2 p.m. on a sunny day in the city. Market Street is bustling. There are families taking pictures in front of the cable car turnaround, couples holding hands as they stroll down the sidewalk, teenagers on metal chairs by the BART station eating Carl's Jr. burgers, and bystanders watching a camera crew film a commercial.

A boombox fills the air with hip-hop. The dancers are turfing, that free-flowing Oakland-born style of gliding footwork, popping and locking. Storytelling through movement. The spectators bob their heads and tap their toes. One teenage boy records the performance with his iPhone.

During a break in the action, a man emerges from the crowd and approaches the dancers. He's barefoot. He asks if they can spare a cigarette. He speaks in a soft, almost shy voice. A homeless guy, they assume. Someone plucks out a cigarette and hands it to him. The man borrows a lighter and takes a deep drag. He is calm and looks harmless. The dancers go about their business.

The man finishes the cigarette. He flicks the butt away. Then he peels off his T-shirt and jeans, and drops them beside a vendor's table. He draws little attention as he undresses. It is an unspectacular sight in a city like this, where eyes are trained to look away and ears are plugged by buds. The dancers turn on the music. The crowd grows.

In nothing but blue boxer shorts, the man walks away, disappearing among the passing faces.