It was Thursday, April 30th at 11:20 PM. As I sat at my desk listening to my police scanner in the background a call comes through that I had heard before but never quite thought about the same way. A local man, just seconds before dispatch had put the call out, had placed a gun to his head and blew his brains out. From every direction, police headed towards the scene. The call was coded as "Critical". The final call into dispatch (of any real substance) was to code the call out as a "66" for Suicide. "But", the officer remarked, "It could be a 64 (homicide), we're not ruling anything out". It turned out to be a suicide, had all of the earmarks of a suicide like no foul play, suidical ideation, and all of the various signs of a death being ruled a suicide, rather than a homicide.
Over the last few days, I have really been thinking about that guy - what was going through his mind at that very moment, what pushed him to the edge and then over? Being the last day of the month, did he not have rent to cover the next month? Had he lost his job? Did he not have food? Why was his situation now "critical" when it should have been "critical" long before he made that decision? What was his last thought? How did he decide what his last thought would be? *sigh*
The next morning, Deborah Jeane Palfrey took her life in the shed on her mother's property. The DC Madam was facing prison time, but relatively speaking, not that much. Most professionals speculate that it would have been less than 10 years and that at 52 years old, she would still have quite a few years to enjoy her life. She wasn't to be sentenced until July. At the very least, she had a few more months of freedom. While reports state that she always said she would kill herself before going back to prison, what made her give up those last few months? Why would she allow her mother to find her?
Finality is just so difficult to deal with and it's always unfair to those of us who watch from afar. What we wouldn't give to just tell Ms. Palfrey to enjoy those last few months. What we wouldn't give to keep that guy from pulling the trigger. The truth of the matter is - suicide is often the victims way of saying, "Everything else in my life has gone to shit, but I'll be good and god damned if I'm not going to be in control of this decision". The unnamed male victim and Ms. Palfrey made the choice that they were going to write the terms to their death - that this wasn't one that fate was going to get over on them.
I've heard quite a few homicide, shootings, tragic accidents (including decapitation), violent carjackings, and far worse on the scanner in the past year - but nothing jarred me quite like this suicide. In all of the aforementioned situations, the victim probably had no choice in the matter. In the latter, the victim had all of the choice yet chose to give themselves "no other choice" at all.
I am not one to judge. I too have fought suicidal thoughts and I know how dark it can be inside one's head when they feel like nobody and nothing can help them. I just wish that suicide victims would choose not to make the "only choice that they feel they can make"
love
