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| Branzuela, Leonard, 06/26/1993; California 32 YO | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 17 2006, 04:06 PM (1,417 Views) | |
| Ell | May 17 2006, 04:06 PM Post #1 |
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Heart of Gold
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http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/b/branzuela_leonard.html![]() Leonard Branzuela, a 32-year-old Lowell High School wrestling coach, got a haircut on a hot June morning in 1993, then walked to his mother's apartment at 17th and Mission. She wasn't home. Leonard went around the corner to a little Mexican restaurant for rice and beans. When he finished eating, he went back to see if his mother, Maria Martinez, had returned. She hadn't. He went back to the restaurant to wait for her, dropping some change into the jukebox to listen to Whitney Houston sing "I Will Always Love You.'' Somebody saw Leonard later, waiting for the 22- Fillmore bus, which winds its way around town to the Marina Green, on the edge of the bay about a mile east of the Golden Gate Bridge. His wallet was found on the bridge's city-facing sidewalk. Somebody saw a body bobbing in the water below. Anna Branzuela says the goal of her brother Leonard "was to get to the Olympics
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Ell Only after the last tree has been cut down; Only after the last fish has been caught; Only after the last river has been poisoned; Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten. | |
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| Ell | May 17 2006, 04:18 PM Post #2 |
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Heart of Gold
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Suffering continues for the survivors, who may develop their own problems The candle never stops burning at Leonard's altar. There, in a cluttered Mission District storefront, Maria Martinez keeps Leonard alive in a poignant shrine of dimming photos and postcards, high school mortarboard, fading sneakers and wrestling trunks - the priceless trinkets of her boy's life. "These are the things a mother keeps," she says simply. Two years ago, just hours after he'd gotten a haircut, Leonard Branzuela, 32, an accomplished amateur wrestler, jumped to his death off the Golden Gate Bridge, a 240-foot plunge that four seconds later took his life. "There are no tears coming out, but I feel like I'm always crying inside," said Martinez, a San Francisco community activist. ". . . We don't think about suicide happening to us. We hide suicide, we don't talk about it. "Many members of my family have died: my mother, my sister, my uncles, an aunt. It was horrible, but they died of natural causes. They were not like suicide. Suicide is not a normal process of life; it is like a murder." When the memorial service ends, when the parade of well-wishers stops, then comes heartbreaking reality. Family members are left to confront their grief, bearing the scars and stigma. For relatives, suicide is a loss like no other, producing an avalanche of jarring, conflicting emotions: anger, grief, shame, guilt. "This kind of death is more difficult than an accidental death or a natural death," said Dr. Alan Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. "Those we can blame on God's will. (But) suicide is viewed as a volitional death. "The family feels responsible. They are locked into feelings of guilt and shame. The "only ifs' are so very difficult." Sometimes there are no signals< Experts cite common warning signs: longstanding depression, suicide threats, striking behavior changes. They note risk factors: mental disorders, personal loss, history of prior attempts. But sometimes the suicide is wholly unexpected, committed by a person seemingly successful in both personal and professional life. There are no overt signals, no direct catalyst for the profound unhappiness that compels such a person to commit suicide. That's the brutal paradox facing the family of Duane Garrett, 48, a radio talk-show host and Democratic consultant who died last week after apparently leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. He left behind a wife and two daughters. "You ask yourself, "Why?' until you wear out the question," said Elaine Sullivan, a licensed counselor and director of the survivors division of the suicide association. "It's like trying to put a puzzle together when you don't have all the pieces," she said. "People say, "My spouse or my child had everything going for them, they were on top of the world.' But those are quite often the people who (commit) suicide. They put a lot of internal pressure on themselves in whatever they do." With some 30,000 suicides annually in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials estimate there are more than 3 million close survivors in the United States. Often, those planning suicide cloak themselves in blinders, so consumed by the intensity of their pain that they can't rationally consider the impact on their families. Rage or martyrdom< For some, suicide is an act of revenge against their family, the ultimate expression of rage. But for those who consider themselves burdens to their families, suicide becomes a type of martyrdom. Survivors are left with the crushing burden of blame. "When someone dies of a disease, we don't ask ourselves how it could have been prevented," said Eve Meyer, executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. "But with suicide, there is a lot of blame and guilt built in. Unconsciously, people are not as supportive as they could be. "It's in the air. No one says a thing, but they transmit, "I wonder.' That is a horrible pain for family members who are wondering themselves, "Is there anything I could have done?' " When it's a child who's left behind, the self-blame can be overwhelming. "You almost become an untouchable," said James Bouquin, 37, of Walnut Creek. "My parents had had a bitter divorce, my dad had alcohol problems, he'd become increasingly withdrawn. . . . A few times he disclosed how he was feeling. As a 14-year-old, I didn't know what to do with that information. When he shot himself, I wasn't surprised, but I felt guilt for not having done something." Bouquin dropped out of high school and wound up with a serious drug problem. Studies show that survivors are more likely to divorce, to have drug or alcohol addictions, to develop ailments like heart disease and strokes, to commit suicide. But Bouquin was lucky. He rebuilt his life, graduated from Stanford University, became an administrative dean. He's now married, a father, and executive director of Crisis and Suicide Prevention in Contra Costa County. "It took me 20 years to feel I was emotionally whole," he said. "I tell kids that the fundamental rule of successful survivorship is you've got to talk to somebody you trust. . . . If you hold these feelings in, like me, it will come out in ways that will screw up your life." Financial anxiety< With most families, feelings of abandonment are magnified by financial anxiety. Some insurance companies void payment in the event of suicide. Others, like State Farm Life Insurance Co., will pay death benefits if the policy was taken out at least two years before the suicide. "I've heard women say, "How could he leave me like this, I don't know how to pay the bills,' " said Neal Clark of Crisis Support Services, an East Bay program. "The tendency in families is to withdraw into yourself. "If only the person who commits suicide knew what this does to his family, he might think twice. One man called the crisis line and said he had a gun and wanted to kill himself. I tried to paint a scenario of how his wife and children would be hurt. He started off saying, "They won't care,' but (eventually) said he'd think about it. I don't know for sure how it ended." < Page B - |
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Ell Only after the last tree has been cut down; Only after the last fish has been caught; Only after the last river has been poisoned; Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten. | |
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| monkalup | Nov 25 2006, 04:19 PM Post #3 |
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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Leonard B. Branzuela Above Images: Branzuela, circa 1993 Vital Statistics at Time of Disappearance Missing Since: June 26, 1993 from San Francisco, California Classification: Endangered Missing Date Of Birth: December 22, 1960 Age: 32 years old Height and Weight: 5'6, 150 pounds Distinguishing Characteristics: Black hair, brown eyes. Branzuela is of Hispanic descent. Details of Disappearance Branzuela was a wrestling coach at Lowell High School in 1993. He had been a championship wrestler and almost qualified to compete in the Olympics in 1988. He got a haircut on the morning of June 26 and afterwards went to the apartment of his mother, Maria Martinez, at 17th and Mission in San Francisco, California. She was not home at the time. Branzuela went to a nearby Mexican restaurant and had lunch, then went back to Martinez's apartment, but she had not returned so he waited for her at the restaurant for some time. Later that day, Branzuela apparently took the 22-Fillmore bus to the Marina Green, on the edge of the San Francisco bay about a mile east of the Golden Gate Bridge. He as last seen on the bridge. His wallet, containing a list of telephone numbers, was later found on the bridge's east sidewalk, and someone saw a body floating in the water. Authorities believe that he committed suicide by jumping from the bridge. Eighteen days passed before Branzuela's family was notified of his presumed death. Martinez accused the bridge's management of negligence. She claimed that barriers or other deterrents should have been erected to prevent suicides. She sued the bridge management for the wrongful death of her son, but the suit was dismissed. Branzuela's remains have never been recovered and his case continues to be classified as that of a missing person. Investigating Agency If you have any information concerning this case, please contact: San Francisco Police Department 415-553-0123 Source Information California Attorney General's Office CNN The Doe Network The San Francisco Chronicle Porchlight for the Missing and Unidentified Updated 4 times since October 12, 2004. Last updated May 26, 2006; picture added. Charley Project Hom |
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Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
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| monkalup | Nov 25 2006, 04:20 PM Post #4 |
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightUSA/...opic=1101&st=0& |
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Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
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| monkalup | Jul 16 2007, 10:48 PM Post #5 |
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?.../31/SUICIDE.TMP Lethal Beauty FAMILY GRIEF: A suicide leaves a legacy of anguish. Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, October 31, 2005 On a warm afternoon in late October 2003, Kathy Hull filled the gas tank of her white '89 Honda Accord and drove from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, winding over the conifer-covered Santa Cruz Mountains through the Silicon Valley sprawl, up Highway 280 along the rolling brown Peninsula hills to San Francisco Bay. Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge at twilight, the 26-year-old UC Santa Cruz student parked her car at Vista Point on the Marin County side of the sweeping red monument, at a place where tourists take in the splendid view of the city and bay. She got out of her car and walked midway across the bridge, placed her purse on the sidewalk and climbed over the railing to the so-called chord, the steel beam on the other side of the rail. Kathy put her cell phone down on the chord. Then she jumped into the cold green waters flowing into the Pacific. • • • Leonard Branzuela, a 32-year-old Lowell High School wrestling coach, got a haircut on a hot June morning in 1993, then walked to his mother's apartment at 17th and Mission. She wasn't home. Leonard went around the corner to a little Mexican restaurant for rice and beans. When he finished eating, he went back to see if his mother, Maria Martinez, had returned. She hadn't. He went back to the restaurant to wait for her, dropping some change into the jukebox to listen to Whitney Houston sing "I Will Always Love You.'' Somebody saw Leonard later, waiting for the 22- Fillmore bus, which winds its way around town to the Marina Green, on the edge of the bay about a mile east of the Golden Gate Bridge. His wallet was found on the bridge's city-facing sidewalk. Somebody saw a body bobbing in the water below. • • • As she always did on Mondays, Marissa Imrie, a 14-year-old sophomore at Santa Rosa High, got a lift to school with her pal Jordan's mom. Before going to her first-period computer class that cold, foggy morning a week before Christmas 2001, Marissa called Yellow Cab on the cell phone her father had given her, and arranged for a taxi to fetch her at 9 a.m. She left school after computer class and walked around the corner to 311 Carrillo St., a rental unit owned by her family. A taxi was waiting in the driveway. Marissa told the driver she wanted to go to the aquarium in San Francisco. He told her that would cost about $150. She pulled out a wad of cash, flashed it at the driver and hopped into the backseat. The driver asked how old Marissa was and why she wasn't in school. She said that she was 18, that she went to junior college. She talked along the way about her passion for cross-country running. About an hour later, they drove south across the Golden Gate Bridge. Just past the toll plaza on the San Francisco side, Marissa asked the driver to pull over so she could use the public bathroom. When she came back out, she told him she was going to walk the rest of the way. OK, he said. She owed him $132. She gave him $150 and told him to keep the change. The cabbie turned around and headed north, back across the bridge. He saw Marissa in his rearview mirror, walking north, back onto the span. That's odd, he thought, then went on his way, his mind filled with other matters. Walking along the east sidewalk, Marissa smiled as she passed a bridge worker who'd said hello. She stopped near a lamppost, laid her wallet on the ground, climbed onto the railing and plunged to her death. • • • Dave Hull climbed down from patching the roof on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 26, 2003. He was thinking of calling his daughter, Kathy. He'd spoken to her the night before. She'd sounded down. Kat was a young woman who took the world to heart. She was a sensitive, spirited, self-doubting person who majored in environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz. She loved plants and animals, and she "took injustice personally," as her brother Steve put it. She'd suffered from depression for some years, but she was coming out of it, family and friends noticed, coping better. She seemed happier. Her father had suggested she come home Sunday, but Kathy had declined. Around 6:20 that evening, the phone rang at the Hull home in the Park Boulevard area of Oakland. Dave Hull answered. A bridge worker asked, "Did you lose your cell phone on the Golden Gate Bridge?" The phone was found on the chord outside the railing and the officer had simply pressed the home number on the cell. He told Hull that Kathy's purse had also been found on the bridge. Hull and Kathy's mother, Jean, sat at their kitchen table waiting for the phone to ring again, waiting while authorities scoured the parking lots for Kathy's Accord. An officer called Hull and told him they had found the car at Vista Point. Inside they'd found her wallet and ID, and a note that suggested where to tow the car if found after sundown. "They found her car," Hull told his wife. She screamed. Then said, "She's gone." Hull said: "She could've walked off somewhere. Let's not give up hope until we have to." More waiting. Then, sometime after 8 p.m., a highway patrolman called from the Coast Guard station at Fort Baker and told Hull that the person who'd been fished from the water on the ocean side of the bridge -- somebody up on the seaward walkway had spotted the body and called authorities -- was his daughter. Hull was shocked. He couldn't believe it. But they had the car, Kathy's driver's license photo and her body. He couldn't disbelieve. He called Steve at Humboldt State and told him. Steve flew home that night. "We wept, and picked him up, and next morning we went to the mortuary," said Hull, a slight, gentle man with straight gray hair and a long Ho Chi Minh-like goatee he let grow in memory of his daughter. • • • Maria Martinez was worried about her son, a championship wrestler who had been one match shy of making it to the 1988 Olympics. It had been more than a week since she'd heard from Leonard, a quiet, able, darkly handsome guy who coached high school and college wrestling. That wasn't like him. They were close. Martinez filed a missing-person report on July 13. The next day, she got a form letter from the California Highway Patrol that had been forwarded from one of Len's previous addresses to another, telling Leonard Branzuela that his wallet had been found and was being held at the CHP's Corte Madera office. His sister, Anna, a San Francisco disease control investigator, picked Martinez up and drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Corte Madera. Apparently the wallet was locked up and whoever had the key wasn't around. A discussion ensued with a superior officer. Then Martinez was handed a suicide report written by a highway patrol officer on June 26, after a witness reported seeing a man in the water beneath the bridge. Officials had found Leonard's wallet on the span's city-side walkway. Martinez screamed. "It was a scream like something I'd never heard before," said Anna Branzuela, who, like her mother, was shocked -- by the news, and by the fact they hadn't been notified. The suicide report said attempts to contact Leonard's family and friends had met with "no success." But his sister said the wallet contained Martinez's business card and her phone numbers and those of other family members and friends. Branzuela led her wailing mother to the car, and in stunned silence they drove home, across the Golden Gate Bridge. • • • Marissa's friend Jordan called Marissa's mother, Renee Milligan, and asked if she'd picked Marissa up early. She hadn't. Milligan put 2-year-old Olivia in the car and drove to Santa Rosa High, to the spot where she always picked up the kids. Jordan and her brother had funny looks on their faces. Milligan's stomach began to ache. She had a horrible feeling something had happened. She'd dreamed a few weeks before that Marissa had been kidnapped. Now she feared the nightmare had come true. Learning that Marissa hadn't been in class for hours, Milligan drove to the police station and phoned her husband, Mike, Marissa's stepfather. The police called the girl's father, Tom Imrie, who lived in Auburn, to see if she'd gone there. No. Milligan drove home in a fog. Pulling onto her street in a neighborhood of little wooden houses built a century ago, she saw four or five police cars across from her house. Milligan was met in her driveway by a serious-looking police officer. She asked if he had news of Marissa. Yes. Was it bad? she asked. Really bad? Yes, he said, leading her into the house. Once inside, she sat down in the front room and was told that her daughter had jumped off the bridge and her body was at the Marin County coroner's office. "My daughter couldn't have gone to Marin, she doesn't drive," Milligan said. She was told about the cab. "You have the wrong person," she said. The police said no. If it was Marissa, she must have been pushed, Milligan said in desperation. But there was a witness, and the cabdriver, and the wallet left behind. Milligan sat on the floor clutching her stomach, crying with her head down. Later she called the coroner's office and was told that her beautiful blue-eyed girl had small razor-blade cuts on her wrists, what the suicide experts call hesitation marks. Milligan hadn't seen them. They were covered by those crystal beaded bracelets Marissa always wore. "I thought, my God, who is this person?" said Milligan, a petite woman with a reddish-brown bob. "This isn't my daughter. She came from a really good, happy home. There wasn't any craziness or strange behavior, or parents that didn't care. So how did this happen?" • • • Marissa was a straight-A student, a self-motivated perfectionist, in her mother's words, a savvy girl with a sardonic wit who could talk about politics and religion and the way women's bodies were portrayed in mass media. Learning came easily; she was the kid other kids called for help with homework. The Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath affected Marissa deeply, Milligan said -- they were planning to attend an anti-war protest the week Marissa died -- and so did the recent death of her mother's brother. But she seemed stable and balanced. After Marissa took her life, her mother got to know the hidden Marissa, the troubled girl who mulled the misery and suffering of the world and saw herself as a "fat, disgusting and boring girl," as she wrote in her suicide note, written in her favorite baby-blue ink. "I love you all. This isn't your fault," Marissa wrote in a spiral-bound notebook Milligan found in Marissa's room, sandwiched on her armoire between "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul'' and "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens." I'm sorry, please forgive me," she wrote. "Don't shut yourselves off from the world." Milligan had seen no signs of depression. Had she read Marissa's journals or gone on her computer -- to her, private places -- she would have learned that Marissa was thinking dark thoughts, had downloaded moody industrial rock like Linkin Park and tapped into a suicide Web site that romantically billed the Golden Gate Bridge as the Niagara Falls for ending it all. "That's the Marissa she didn't let anybody see, this secret, pained girl that thought she wasn't normal," said Milligan, 48, sitting in the cozy Santa Rosa home owned by her great-grandfather. "She was a master at hiding her depression." The night Marissa died, Milligan's big extended family and friends packed the house and offered solace. Her doctor sedated her. She slept for a few hours. When she woke, "I would just go into the front room and sit on the floor, curl up with my arms around my knees with her picture there." For months she took sedatives and antidepressants. "I didn't want to live," Milligan said. "I was hoping God would have a Mack truck run me over." If not for her other daughter, now 5-year-old Olivia -- who routinely asks people who in their family has died -- "I wouldn't be here." That first week Milligan got a call from the Yellow cabbie who'd driven Marissa to the city. He felt horrible and blamed himself. She assured him it wasn't his fault. Milligan and her family planned Marissa's memorial, which drew about 600 people to Santa Rosa's St. Rose Catholic Church, and arranged for her ashes to be interred at Calvary Cemetery. The family went ahead with plans to get away from all the Christmas craziness by spending a few days on the beach at Aptos. Stopping at the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza, Milligan asked the toll taker whom they could talk to about somebody who'd jumped off the bridge. "Was that your daughter the other day?" the woman asked with a pained expression, refusing to take the $3 toll and directing the family to the bridge office. There Milligan met two officials who'd been on duty that day. They'd never met the family of a jumper before. They directed her to pole No. 107 and bent the rules by giving the Milligans permission to drop a bouquet of lavender 'Sterling Silver' roses -- Marissa's favorite -- into the choppy waters below. It was a bitterly cold, gray day. "The bridge did not look romantic or stately," Milligan said. "It just looked like ugly metal. This is not a wonderful way to go, I thought. This is not what that Web site said." Milligan went to therapy, joined a support group of others who'd lost a loved one to suicide, volunteered at the Sutter VNA Hospice. She went to Mass and cried. Her mother-in-law helped raise Olivia while she pulled herself together. "I feel like my whole DNA changed. It was such a huge shift. Dec. 17, 2001, was this huge marker -- before and after. I chose to live after about a year, and educate myself, my family and others so this won't have to happen." Milligan told her story in "To Save a Child," a DVD for elementary school educators narrated by Mariel Hemingway (whose famous grandfather, Ernest, shot himself to death). "I've come out the other side, but I'm scarred for life. It's tattooed on my soul. Not a day goes by that I don't think about Marissa." • • • Dave Hull couldn't do much of anything for a few months after Kathy died. He and his wife went to the coroner's office to claim her body, to the mortuary to arrange her cremation. In the days that followed, Hull kept his pain at bay by planning Kathy's memorial. An unexpectedly large crowd turned out at Oakland's Lake Merritt United Methodist Church: old family friends, Kathy's teachers and fellow students from Santa Cruz and Merritt College, grammar school chums not seen in years. She probably didn't know how many people would be pained by her death. "No, I don't think she understood that," Hull said, wiping away tears. He was sitting in an armchair in his spacious old office overlooking the bay at Fort Mason, his face lit and shaded by the fading light of a beautiful late-March afternoon. Hull is the poetic principal librarian at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. There was a picture of a smiling, 16-year-old Kathy on the table. She was photographed in a blue parka aboard the Alma, the park's flagship scow schooner, sailing the bay on a sunny day in 1993, the bridge in the background. Hull painted a picture of life after Kathy, his voice floating and trailing into silence. Hull didn't work for eight weeks. Didn't shave, cut his hair or mow the lawn. He ate and showered because people told him he should. "The world stopped," he said. "The world stopped." Hull paused, took deep breaths. "And it struck me as wrong, just wrong, to do anything. Her death was this fact that stood alone in the universe, and mowed down everything else in the universe." He contemplated suicide. "You say all these different things, and they're all true: Life isn't worth living; I'm guilty; I should've -- They're all a reason to die. But I decided not to. But my emotional state for months after that was on a knife's edge, and I could've fallen off and gone either way. It really made me angry when people would say things like, 'You have to move on,' because" -- Hull choked up -- "it felt to me like abandoning my daughter, and that wasn't right. "I lost my father when I was 12, and that was just a rough patch. I lost my mother about 10 years ago, and that struck me harder than I expected, but that was a rough patch. I lost my father figure" -- Maritime Museum founder Karl Kortum -- "seven or eight years ago, and that struck me harder than my mother did, but that, in the end, was just a rough patch. Kathy's death was unspeakable. It's not just a rough patch." • • • Kathy had had her ups and downs over the previous decade. She'd taken LSD when she was 16, and the experience messed her up. She'd been straight and sober ever since and did well in school. Those close to her saw her depression lifting. Ten days before she died, Kathy paid her car insurance for six months. "I think she did that because she was planning to use it," Hull said. "She apparently had a series of insights that were too much for her to handle." The decision to commit suicide "was an action taken in the grip of intense pain." The previous summer, Kathy and her dad had taken a backpacking trip to some hot springs in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They had to cross a meandering creek about 10 times to get there. On the way back, Kathy negotiated every ford but the last. She slipped on a wet stone and fell into the creek. The incident struck Hull later as emblematic. Over the years, "she had made all the crossings, except this last one. She slipped. And if she could've got past that. ... I think if there had been any kind of delay that day -- a flat tire, a traffic jam, a dog in pain, a suicide barrier -- anything to get her past that moment, there's a fair chance she'd be here today. Or perhaps not. But if there'd been a suicide barrier there, at least she'd have a chance." If only. What if. Those phrases echoed in his mind many times as he grappled with the loss of his daughter. Although Kathy made the decision to end her life, Hull thinks he and his wife share some responsibility for her fate -- "I think I bear a big part of the load, I'm her father," he said. "I believe the bridge district bears some responsibility for not putting a deterrent up there. I believe that every person who walks the streets of San Francisco who believes aesthetics are more important than taking care of our disabled -- and I used to believe that -- bears an iota of responsibility. Enough to say, 'Life, yes, barrier, yes.' " • • • Maria Martinez, a political organizer who once worked for Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was outraged by the way the CHP handled the case of her son, Leonard, whose body was never found. In the weeks after she finally got the suicide report, Martinez lobbied powerful friends, such as then state Sen. Art Torres, to get the highway patrol to investigate why 18 days passed before Branzuela's family was notified that he'd apparently committed suicide. "I haven't had a chance to mourn," Martinez said in 1993 after attending Len's funeral Mass at Mission Dolores. "I've had to spend all my energies battling the same bureaucracies I've been fighting for 30 years." Martinez accused officials of being lax about Branzuela's case because he was Latino, and later sued the bridge district for the wrongful death of her son. The suit was dismissed. After learning of Len's presumed suicide, his mother and sister rented a helicopter to search for his body in the waters and along the shores near the bridge. Leonard's wallet had been found more than two weeks earlier, "but we felt we had to do something," said Anna Branzuela. "We just had to do something. It was terrible." Branzuela and her mother talked to people in the neighborhood and pieced together a picture of Leonard's whereabouts the day he disappeared. They couldn't divine, though, what was going on in his mind and emotions that hot June day. "My brother was not an overly depressed person," said Anna Branzuela, sipping water at a South of Market Starbucks one afternoon. "I think there was just a real struggle with him not making his goals. And maybe the direction that his life was going. His goal was to get to the Olympics. He was a smart person, real disciplined. It's hard when someone is that disciplined and they're not able to achieve some of these things. "I think this was a momentary crisis. One of the hardest things is knowing how lonely and alone he must've felt. You go back to these opportunities when you could've asked those questions: What's going on, or how can we help? You'll never have the answer, never. We all carry a guilt of what could we have done. I think about him every day." So does Leonard's mother. "When your kid dies, you forget all the stuff that happened before. It's like your heart stops," Martinez said at Los Jarritos restaurant on South Van Ness, where she's a familiar figure. She's a short, sturdy Chicana who grew up in Barstow, on the California edge of the Mojave Desert, the youngest of eight children. "It was a devastating loss. He was like a hero to us. He was the first to go to different countries. He was one of the first team captains for the Junior Olympics. There's always something missing," she went on, tears welling up. "And you can't replace it. We never had closure. It's not like we can go visit his grave. Where am I going to go -- the bridge?" • • • Renee Milligan works these days as an event coordinator for a catering company. She talks to students about depression. She and her family try to make the best of life. But she still has those days when maybe she doesn't get dressed till 1 p.m., when "maybe I just kind of wander around the house and look at pictures," Milligan said, "just sit and have tea and be alone with my thoughts." She remembered the night before Marissa died, around Christmastime. They'd had a nice dinner and were cozy in the living room, watching some forgettable movie. Marissa asked her mom for a back scratch. "I said to myself, getting a little sentimental, I am the luckiest person in the world. I have this beautiful family, I have a gorgeous, smart daughter, I have a beautiful baby asleep in the other room, I have a wonderful husband. This great life. How could it get any better? I felt so comforted and safe. When we got the news about Marissa, all the innocence of life was gone. Our family will never be the same. Our family was shattered. But now, it's like, OK, this is what we have. We have this beautiful little girl. We have the three of us." And the memory of Marissa. "Every day I miss her." This past July, Marissa's father, Tom Imrie, hanged himself from a tree at his Occidental home. He left a suicide note that said, among other things, how painful it was to live without his daughter. • • • Maria Martinez has a shrine to Leonard in her apartment, with pictures and candles. His sister, Anna, has one at her place, too. She gazes at it every day and thinks of the handsome brother who vanished. When out-of-town guests want to see the famous Golden Gate Bridge, she takes them someplace else. "The San Mateo Bridge," she joked. For her, "the symbol of San Francisco is a symbol of pain." She's found a place inside to deal with the loss of Leonard, and "you find it's OK to laugh, to talk about him. But there's another part that never goes away. People always say that time heals things. I find that time just magnifies the loss." • • • Little by little, Dave Hull became more active. He had to do things, such as sell Kathy's car, that forced him to move on. "Life is inexorable," said Hull, who has written poems about Kathy and had a number of hyper-real "after-death experiences" in which he and she communicated. "I don't know if they were actual perceptions of a reality beyond what sense can perceive, or a creation of a deep need of mine." Whatever they were, they gave him peace. Hull's passionate involvement in the campaign to put up a suicide barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge -- he has lobbied politicians, friends and church groups to back the effort -- has also helped him deal with his daughter's death. If anything good has come from Hull's shattering experience, it's that he has become more sensitive to strangers and associates. He found himself giving $20 bills to homeless people, helping troubled colleagues. He's fine when he's engaged -- with his maritime work, hiking with his wife, reading a mystery novel or snowboarding with his son. But when he's not busy, Hull slips into what he calls his default state: a pervasive sadness, punctuated with moments of grief. "There's an ache," he says, "an ongoing ache." The sun had set into the Pacific, and Hull sat quietly in the growing darkness of his office. Through the window he could see the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, set against the twilit sky. "It's a good thing to get a barrier up there,'' he said. "It's too late for Kathy. But it might not be too late for the rest of us, all the children and parents and those other people, those unexpected people that we can't even imagine, who would be devastated, or at least lessened somehow, by a suicide." Hull was smitten by the bridge's regal beauty when he moved to San Francisco more than 30 years ago. He'd go there and drink it in. When he returned to work after Kathy's death, he forced himself to look at the bridge, figuring, "If I look at it enough, it will stop killing me every time I look at it. I gave up on that. It's not beautiful anymore. Well, it is beautiful. But it's deadly.'' |
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Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
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| monkalup | Mar 5 2010, 11:22 AM Post #6 |
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The Old Heifer! An oxymoron, of course.
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San Francisco Police Department 415-553-0123 Agency Case Number: 931133441 NCIC Number: M-662594898 |
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Lauran "If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." The late, great Roberto Clemente. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. | |
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8:02 PM Jul 10