Free The Final Leap by John Bateson

retired from the faculty at Purdue University in 1947 at age seventy-two, and died two years later. He’s remembered as a self-effacing man, uninterested in the limelight. He didn’t spend a lot of time bemoaning his dismissal, and it’s not known whether he ever saw the Golden Gate Bridge in person after it was completed. Nevertheless, he kept a picture of the bridge over his desk at work and was known to say, if anyone brought it up, “I designed every stick of steel on that bridge.”
    The archives at Purdue contain Ellis’s papers, letters, and engineering drawings with his signature on them, plus telegrams and photographs. Once they were unearthed, it was suggested to the Golden Gate Bridge District that Ellis receive some sort of tribute as the true designer. Since a statue of Joseph Strauss was erected near the bridge, perhaps a portion of the span could be named in Ellis’s honor. The matter was referred to a historical research committee of the American Association of Civil Engineers. The committee confirmed Ellis’s work, but the drive to see that Ellis receive proper credit lost momentum. With the passage of time, and all of the key players deceased, no one really cared who did what. All that mattered was that the bridge was built, and that it was an architectural and engineering triumph. The person who made, perhaps, the single greatest contribution to the construction of one of the modern wonders of the world became a mere footnote in history.
    As for Irving Morrow, the man who designed the pedestrian walkways and in all likelihood made the decision to lower the railing on the bridge, thereby creating the opportunity for virtually anyone of any age to jump, he returned to his architectural business, designing residential and commercial buildings with his wife. If he had any regrets about the bridge, he didn’t express them publicly. Morrow died in 1952 at the age of sixty-eight. At that time, the official number of bridge suicides was under 150. In the coming years it would escalate dramatically.
    While preventative measures were being implemented at other sites that were developing reputations as suicide magnets, business continued as usual on the Golden Gate Bridge. Commuters crossed daily, tolls were collected, tourists took snapshots, the bravery of bridge workers was extolled, and people everywhere continued to marvel at the beauty of it all.
    What also continued were bridge suicides. “Why do they make it so easy?” one jumper lamented in a suicide note.
    For the families of the victims, whose numbers increased every month, it wasn’t business as usual. Instead, it was the beginning of their worst nightmare, a nightmare that, try as they might, they could never fully wake from.

THREE
Endless Ripple
Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl.
    â€”Suicide note of Marissa Imrie, age 14,
  who jumped in 2001
    It is widely believed that each suicide directly affects at least six people, family members and close friends. Since there are more than 35,000 suicides every year, on average, in the United States, roughly 200,000 Americans lose a loved one to suicide annually. Over ten years, that’s two million people, all of them grieving a new, inexplicable, and often preventable death.
    The dark trail of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge over decades has left thousands of people to mourn. In uncovering the personal stories of victims and their families, one learns how silence and stigma have conspired to mask the depth and breadth of the social costs of these suicides.
    Renee Milligan’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Marissa Imrie, jumped from the bridge on December 17, 2001. Marissa was a straight-A student at Santa Rosa High School, the same high school her mother graduated from. Ironically, Milligan had chosen the Golden Gate Bridge as the subject of a senior class report. Although she was afraid of heights, Milligan had walked