Rose says she pressed him for details, but Eric was reluctant. They agreed that he should see a therapist, and Eric told Rose that he didn’t want anyone, including his father or brother, to know.
The next week, Rose accompanied Eric to the offices of Monadnock Family Services, a community mental health agency in Keene. It was there, David would later claim in a wrongful death lawsuit against the facility, that Eric was grossly misdiagnosed. (The agency and doctors denied any wrongdoing.)
The case never made it to trial and was settled out of court, and one of the provisions of the settlement bars the parties from discussing it. But according to court documents, Eric was evaluated by Monadnock Family Services psychologist Richard Slammon, who took the following notes:
“Eric reports suicidal ideation that has been fairly chronic for close to one-and-a-half years. This ideation has included some degree of planning but no intent. Eric adamantly denies that he would ever or has ever acted on his suicidal feelings, primarily because he is aware of the impact that such an act would have on his family, whom he reports to love very much. Eric’s risk for causing harm to himself is considered to be moderate, but not acutely at risk at present.”
Slammon then referred Eric to the psychiatrist Richard Stein, who met with Eric six days later. According to the allegations, Dr. Stein prescribed Eric several drugs without his parents’ consent: Prozac and Paxil, the powerful antianxiety medications Klonopin and Lorazepam, and the sleep-inducing drug Trazadone.
“After that first visit, Eric just shut me out,” recalls Rose. “I didn’t know anything. Eric didn’t want to talk about it. [Monadnock Family Services] didn’t tell me anything about any drugs. I just thought he was going to see a therapist to talk about whatever he was feeling. I had never seen a therapist. Depression doesn’t run in my family, and I don’t even know if anyone in my family has ever seen a therapist. I was just completely clueless. I just thought a therapist was someone you go to see for a few sessions, and then you feel better.”
Eric wasn’t feeling better. He saw Dr. Stein again twice more the next month. According to court documents summarizing the expected expert witness testimony of psychiatrist Allen Shwartzberg, of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, Dr. Stein’s notes “clearly indicate a severe and life-threatening deterioration of Eric’s condition. Dr. Stein completely failed to recognize and/or treat this condition… Dr. Stein’s notes document self-destructive behavior of drinking glasses of undiluted liquor, mixing alcohol with drugs against the doctor’s advice, and over-medicating himself with the prescribed medication…The drug regimen prescribed was inappropriate, particularly in light of Eric’s abuse of the drugs and his use of alcohol.”
(According to press reports, Dr. Stein was prepared to call expert witnesses to demonstrate that he met an appropriate standard of care.)
♦♦♦
Like many suicidal teenagers, Eric was drinking heavily in the last few months of his life. (When he died, his blood alcohol level was at .41 percent). David says he never saw Eric drinking and that the liquor wasn’t coming from home. But alcohol isn’t hard to get in Swanzey (“I could make one call and have whatever I need on my doorstep in twenty minutes,” a Monadnock senior told me).
Still, Eric didn’t exhibit many of the characteristics of a depressed or suicidal teenager: He didn’t seem sad. He didn’t have mood swings. He didn’t express self-hatred. He didn’t harass others. He didn’t gain weight, lose weight, or withdraw noticeably from friends and family. And he didn’t talk about death.
Until the end, Eric looked just fine. When Rose told David in mid-August about what Eric had told her on Hampton Beach, David was stunned.
“The whole thing was just so off the wall,” he recalls. “I spoke to Eric for about thirty minutes that night, and he blew the whole thing off. He said he was a little bit stressed, but now he was fine. I just accepted what he said on face value. I didn’t know about any drugs. He was still always smiling.”
But in the week before Eric died, Monadnock soccer coach Chana Robbins didn’t see Eric’s smile as often as he would have liked. In fact, Robbins and Eric were frequently in disagreement, with coach wanting more hustle from his best player and player wanting less lip from his vocal coach.
On September 27, 1999, four days before his death, Eric knew it would take more than a smile to convince Robbins to let Denene Groat ride on the team bus to an away game in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Eric would have to rely on another of his talents: “his incredible ability to bullshit,” says friend Kris Kesney.
Eric told Robbins that Groat had to ride on the team bus, because the pair needed to work on a photography project for school. (Eric was a remarkably talented photographer.) Groat was going to take pictures of the game, Eric told Robbins. Never mind that there was no film in the camera, or that Groat didn’t know how to work it.
In Lebanon, Groat stood on the sidelines and pretended to take pictures of Eric, who played his usual brand of garish, aggressive, trash-talking soccer. Groat also pretended to take pictures of Greg, then a sophomore, who patrolled the Monadnock defense with physical, no-nonsense intensity.
Robbins felt Eric’s mind was elsewhere on that day, and Robbins was furious when Eric drew a yellow card for roughly tripping an opposing player in the open field. He pulled Eric from the game, and Monadnock went on to lose 2–0.
On the bus trip home, Eric rested his head in Groat’s lap. “I’m so depressed,” he told her. Groat assumed he was talking about soccer.
♦♦♦
Three days later, Eric quit the team after Robbins took away Eric’s captain status for two games. The next day, Eric left school early with no explanation. Worried, Groat drove to the condo Eric then shared with his brother and father.
David was at work, Greg was at school, and the door to Eric’s room was locked. She walked downstairs, where she found a single-page, handwritten note signed by Eric: “I can no longer watch depression win me over and destroy my opportunities… Soccer plays no part in this… I am sorry you cannot fully comprehend my situation for just one second… I was not chemically meant for this world.”
Depression? Chemically meant for this world? Groat didn’t understand a word of it. “Eric was the happiest kid in the world; this made no sense,” she says. “Going up to his room again, I was just telling myself that he was sleeping or playing a joke or anything.”
She grabbed a coat hanger from Greg’s room and unlocked Eric’s door, using the technique Eric—prone to doing absent-minded things, like locking himself out of his room—had taught her.
When Groat opened the door, she found Eric dead on the floor, his father’s .44 Ruger by his head. Hysterical, she yelled at him. She tried to call the police, but Eric had disconnected the phone. She ran outside and knocked on every door in the complex, but no one was home. She fell to the ground, unable to speak or walk. She crawled across the street to a neighbor’s house, where someone finally opened the door.
At Monadnock, the soccer team was midway through practice when David came sprinting down the hill and called Greg off the field.
“By the way David came running, we knew something had happened,” says Josh Tong, the team’s senior goalie and a friend of Greg’s. “We thought that maybe Eric had gotten into a car accident. They rushed us all over to the side of the field, and you could see David and Greg talking. Then Greg just dropped to his knees.”
♦♦♦
Monadnock Regional High School serves eight nearly all-white, mostly working- and middle-class rural communities. The school made national news in 1991 when a 16-year-old former student, wielding a rifle and wearing a trench coat, took fifteen students hostage in a classroom just as morning classes began.
As frightened teens ran for the exits, the principal, Daniel Stockwell, followed the boy to room 73, knocked on the door, slowly entered, and sat on the desk. While the boy pointed the rifle at Stockwell’s head, the principal convinced him to let the students go. Police later entered the classroom and subdued the student, and Stockwell was labeled a hero.
There were no similar scares at Monadnock last year, although there was a real concern that Greg might kill himself. Three weeks after Eric’s death, Greg told a friend, Lindsey Jernberg, that he was going to overdose on pills.
“Greg and I had talked every night since Eric’s death, usually about Eric,” recalls Jernberg, a popular Monadnock senior who plays softball, field hockey, and basketball. “So I called him at about eight the night of his last soccer game, and he wasn’t himself. He wasn’t talking at all. I knew something was wrong. I kept hounding him, asking him what was wrong. Finally he just lost it. He started yelling at me and swearing at me. He said, ‘I can’t believe you fucking called me! You ruined all my fucking plans! I had everything fucking planned!’”
Greg was hospitalized for ten days and started seeing a therapist and a psychiatrist, who prescribed him Paxil. Greg told friends he got little out of his therapy sessions and didn’t like taking his medication. “He joked a lot that he couldn’t get an erection on Paxil,” says friend and Monadnock senior Tim Wilder.
To everyone who knew him, Greg was a different person after Eric died. “Part of me knew on some level that Greg would probably end up killing himself,” says Josh Tong, a good friend of Greg’s. “I had never seen someone so sad and angry.”
Much of Greg’s anger was aimed at his mother, whom he never forgave for not telling him that Eric was depressed. They often fought on the phone, and the last conversation they had before Greg died ended when Rose hung up on him.
Greg also expressed constant disappointment in fellow students, whom he said were shallow and superficial (often to their face).
“He was so angry at the world, at students, at his family, at himself for not doing better,” says Katharine DePew. “When Eric was alive, Greg didn’t care where he was, or what he was doing, or anything, because he could live in Eric’s shadow, which is where he felt comfortable. When Eric died, Greg was just so lost.” (continued on page 4)
As a pharmacist, I was mostly appalled at the number of drugs this child was prescribed. Those are very heavy drugs and I can’t imagine putting a child on trazodone. Suicide is largely preventable, but I see this as a parental failure compounded by poor psychiatric care. People are so afraid to say “are you thinking about suicide? do you have a plan?” because they think it will give someone ideas. And while there is always the possibility that a suicidal person is committed enough to lie, most will be honest. And if a child’s sibling, parent, or close friend… Read more »
Having endured a two-year suicidal depression I feel compelled to respond to the tone of many of the comments. Unless you are terminally ill with a non-related illness, suicide is a tragic mistake. No matter how bad you feel, or what your reasons–wait. Suicide is nowhere near as inevitable as many of the commenters say. Tough it out. I don’t think you could get much worse off than I was, though this is not a competition! I couldn’t understand why anyone wanted to be alive. I thought my family would be better off without me dragging everyone down. I often… Read more »
Allison, You and I have a lot in common. I too suffered a crushing depression. I spent a year planning my suicide, but I never attempted it because I had no intention of failing – and I needed to know there was aboslutely no other solution before taking that final step. That was more than half my life ago. But it is a mistake to assume that because you and I were able to survive, that everyone is able to ‘tough it out’ as we did. As you pointed out, somewhere deep inside we wanted to live. A friend of… Read more »
I just sent this note to my editor at The Good Men’s Project after reading your column here as I just sent him a column on my brother Erik yesterday: “OMG just read Brother’s Keeper on your site as I saw a post on my facebook thread from the page there..way too eerie…Eric a brother who commits suicide…brother’s keeper …my brother’s name is Erik and he attempted suicide as I say in my article and I have felt responsible …holy coincidence!” A tragic story, sad for everyone. I’ve been living with guilt for 30 years and my brother “lived”. I… Read more »
Some people’s troubles are so great they’re a black hole, swallowing everything their friends and coleagues can spare. And it makes no difference. There’s no reason to feel guilty for not having an infinite amount of time, attention, care, and competence.
I am happy to see this piece edited from its original version, which still is floating around on the web. I was one of the girls who turned Greg down in the weeks before his death, and at the time when this story was being written, I refused to be interviewed. It’s been over nine years since we lost Greg, and I have thought of him every single day. Recently, I saw David (his and Eric’s dad) for the first time since Greg’s funeral, and it was the first time I was able to talk about Greg without having it… Read more »
Thanks for your insights. Hopefully your comments, and the piece as a whole, will give a broader understanding to mental health at such a precarious age.
I finally got around to a lot of reading I’ve been putting off due to a family crisis, and i read this poignant, yet perfectly reported piece, with great intensity. Years ago, I reported on teen suicides for a local CT newspaper and the ignorance then—1983 or so—was astounding. The title of the article was “When Feelings Prove Fatal” But in those days no one completely understood the name and/or prevalence of bi-polar behavior, and other chemical risks for suicide, including congenital, self-induced or both. Unfortunately, in 1988 I learned too much about suicide when a dear friend drowned himself… Read more »
Benoit…that was really a poignant and terribly tragic story. I feel so bad for the parents. It’s not fair for people to blame the father for having a gun in the house. That kid was so overwhelmed with thoughts of suicide and depression he would have found some way to take his life. I’ve worked in a facility with suicidal kids. When they are obsessed with committing suicide they will find a way to do it. If there is no mental breakthrough with the kid, then it’s only a matter of time. It’s enough of a loss for the parents… Read more »
Greg was “so overwhelmed with thoughts of suicide and depression he would have found some way to take his life”. At the funeral, David called Greg’s suicide “a train wreck in slow motion”, and I believe that it would have happened even without a gun. But if Eric’s first attempt had ended the way Greg’s first attempt did, which would have been much more likely without a gun, he might have received better treatment and they might both still be alive.
It’s what we mothers of unstable kids fear all the time. This is not a completely unusual case. The suicide rate for bipolar people is 1 in 5, for schizophrenics, 1 in 10. Knowing it’s almost impossible to prevent is the hardest thing of all.
Thanks for writing about this, Benoit. It really brings the issue home.
Great piece. It seems they were wired the same and when one decided to end his life, the other was too grief-stricken to go on. Tragic.
Wow. Great reporting and writing, Benoit. What a human tragedy. And somehow made even more poignant since Monadnock is the favorite mountain of Grover’s Corners in Wilder’s Our Town.