Heather Quisenberry and her daughter, Mariah Gil, stopped halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, approached the railing, and looked over the edge. Below them, the waters of the San Francisco Bay were serene, the morning fog drifting from the Pacific Ocean and hiding any signs of civilization.
Heather, 52, walked towards one of the light poles that line the roadway, placed her hands on its cold steel and closed her eyes. Her son, Alexander Quisenberry, jumped from here 18 years ago.
A few minutes passed before Heather returned to Mariah. They held hands, cried and embraced as raindrops fell.
“He used to tell me: ‘Never give up, keep fighting for your dreams,’ said Mariah, 31, who was a teen when Alexander took his life. “Now I would like to tell him that I was so proud of the man who he was.”
For families like Heather and Mariah’s, this landmark has become their children’s gravesite.
The Golden Gate Bridge has long been known as one the deadliest suicide locations in the world, with at least 1,700 deaths since the bridge was completed in 1937.
Research has shown that young people like Alexander are among the most at risk of dying here.
Those who study the Golden Gate say it provides a particular lure because of its fame and its ready availability. But they’ve also found that, when a person survives a suicide attempt or can be prevented from one altogether, they often do not go on to attempt again. It’s a reminder, mental health advocates say, that recovery is possible.
This reality has spawned a years-long movement to save lives by reducing access to the bridge, led by the parents and relatives of young suicide victims. Now, their fight is at last nearing a significant payoff.
A stainless steel net extending 20ft below and 20ft out from the bridge is on the verge of completion. Relatives and officials alike hope the barrier will stem the tide of deaths.
Construction of the barrier began in 2018 and it is expected to finish at the end of this year. But the project has faced numerous delays and ballooning costs, as well as opposition from local residents who cited aesthetics and the multimillion-dollar price tag.
As the debate continued, so did the tragedies. In the five years since construction of the barrier began, at least 128 people have jumped to their deaths. Even with the suicide net now 80% completed and a 24-hour security patrol, as of October, there have been at least 13 fatalities this year, according to official numbers from the Golden Gate Bridge, highway and transportation district, the authority that operates and maintains the edifice.
For parents living with the daily grief of losing a child, the installation of the barrier is a hopeful and long-overdue moment.
Before her son’s death, Heather wasn’t aware of how often suicides occurred at the bridge. “It became the bridge of death to me,” she said. “If people couldn’t jump from it, they wouldn’t. It’s a suicide magnet, in part, because there is access.”
A phone call from a private number
Alexander Lyndon Quisenberry was born on 13 September 1984, three days after Heather’s 18th birthday. The age difference created a special bond between the young mother and her firstborn child. They used to drive around their home town, the city of Walnut Creek, get ice coffees and sing hip-hop together.
“We would wear sunglasses and spend our afternoons rocking out, singing, just like friends,” Heather said. “But there were times he needed more than just a friend.”
By his early teenage years, Alexander was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. He also struggled growing up fatherless and witnessing the financial difficulties his mother faced in one of the most expensive regions in the country.
In an essay written during his time as a student at Diablo Valley College, which Heather keeps to this day, Alexander said his mother could only afford to shop for clothes twice a year, and if he was hungry at school, he had to eat free lunches provided for low-income students.
Alexander attempted suicide for the first time at the age of 12. That afternoon, his best friend called Heather to tell her Alexander had overdosed on prescribed medication. He was found curled up and shaking in pain at an abandoned mobile home in the neighborhood, and he was later taken to a behavioral health inpatient facility in Walnut Creek.
“He was too mentally ill to be at home while me, a single parent, had to work all day,” Heather said.
Despite the instability caused by transfers to several facilities, including one in Oregon, during his adolescence, Alexander faced the first years of his adulthood with striking enthusiasm. He found a job at a clothing store in Walnut Creek, where he met other young people who encouraged him to pursue a college degree.
“I enjoy knowing I am working hard toward what is important to me, my education,” Alexander wrote in that college essay, titled A Frown Turns Into a Smile.
On 29 September 2005, the day Alexander died, Michael Sher was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to his home in Marin county, just north of the bridge.
As he crossed the span, he saw Alexander jump, disappearing from his view in a matter of seconds. Frantic, he called the police from his car. “There’s a feeling of helplessness,” said Sher, now 64. “I started honking the horn because I didn’t know what to do.”
A coastguard crew responded as fast as they could. Alexander was still breathing and had a pulse, but was “completely unresponsive”, according to the investigation report. He received medical intervention, the report noted, including CPR.
He was pronounced dead at 5.45pm, 19 minutes after Sher had called 911.
On the afternoon Alexander died, Heather was heading home to Pittsburg, 40 miles south-west of San Francisco. As darkness fell, she received a call. It was a woman who worked at the boarding-and-care home where Alexander lived at the time, wanting to know where he was.
Heather called hospitals in the area, fearing the worst. Alexander had invited her and Mariah for lunch in San Francisco that day, but they hadn’t been able to make it. She hadn’t heard from him since.
“As a mother, you start wondering: is he hurt? Is he lost somewhere? Is he ditched on a highway?”
Heather grew increasingly desperate as time went on. She talked to her neighbors and called local police departments, but no one had information. It didn’t help that her personal computer, where she saved old photos from Alexander’s childhood, had recently been stolen.
On 13 October 2005, two weeks after Alexander had gone missing, Heather drove five miles east to a Fry’s Electronics store, where she planned to buy a new computer, hoping to recover the old photos of her child. That was one way, she thought, to bring him back.
But minutes after arriving at the store, Heather got a phone call from a private number.
“A lady asked, ‘Is this Heather Quisenberry?’ I answered ‘yes’. Then she asked, ‘Do you have a son named Alexander Quisenberry?’ I answered ‘yes’ again, and at that point, I remember leaning against a pillar, as the lady in the other line remained in silence.”
Time stopped. What happened immediately after the call remains a blur in her memory.
Pamela Carter, then the Marin county coroner investigator, had received a call earlier that day from an FBI detective who said the agency had a fingerprint ID for John Doe 92905. It was Alexander.
How a crisis sparked a movement
During his 36 years at the Marin county coroner’s office, Ken Holmes saw death thousands of times. He worked on the Trailside Killer investigation, a series of rape-murders of women in the Golden Gate area during the 1970s and 80s, and other infamous cases.
However, it was the deaths nobody paid attention to that stuck with him even after retirement, he said.
On a recent September afternoon, Holmes, now 81, parked outside the main entrance of the Marin county civic center, a mid-century building with a blue roof that curved against the sky. He pointed at the window of what used to be his office. The years have flown by, but his memories remain vivid.
When Holmes started working for the coroner’s office as a death investigator, he had heard of one or two suicides. It wasn’t until 1990 that he became aware of how frequently people were jumping off the bridge.
That was the year the coastguard, which attempts to recover most of the jumpers, moved its station from San Francisco to Marin county. This meant that, when a body was found, the responsibility of investigating the death was turned over to Holmes’s office.
The scale of the problem astounded him. Historically, about 30 people have jumped off the bridge every year on average, according to the bridge district. That is two or three deaths every month.
“As a coroner, I had to issue a report on the number of deaths, suicides, homicides every year,” said Holmes, explaining that he created a separate reporting category for bridge suicides.
“A lot of people realized that they were going to be found and they wanted their families to know, so they took an ID with them. I’ve seen driver’s licenses duct-taped to a chest on a couple of guys because they didn’t want it to get lost,” said Holmes, who remained the head of the coroner’s office for 12 years.
He also saw devastating physical injuries caused by the force of impact against the water. “The ribs fracture on compression and they fold in and the jagged edges tear the lungs, the heart and sometimes the stomach.”
It is believed that the actual number of suicides is much higher than 1,700, Holmes said, because of the bodies that are never found.
The Marin county coroner’s office relies on witnesses or other sources to determine if a suicide can be attributed to the bridge. In some cases, people leave a note, explaining why they ended their lives. Others do not document the reasons behind their decisions.
In 2007, Holmes released a report about the 206 suicides from the bridge over the past decade. The majority of jumpers were white and male, and most were between the ages of 14 and 44. The most common occupation was student.
Initially, Holmes opposed media coverage on suicides because he thought it gave people an incentive to jump from the bridge. But after years of seeing little change, he came to believe that limiting news coverage didn’t help. Holmes knew people very close to him who had jumped off the bridge. He personally delivered the news in some instances and bonded with mourning family members.
The experience motivated him to get involved with the Bridge Rail Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing suicide.
Holmes joined the all-volunteer group and decided to bring public attention to the tragedies. The group was co-founded in 2006 by Dave Hull, three years after his 26-year-old daughter, Kathy Hull, jumped from the bridge. The foundation’s primary advocacy goal is completing the suicide deterrent net.
A common argument against the suicide net is that if people want to die, they’ll find a way to do it elsewhere. But studies have shown a strong association between the Golden Gate Bridge and suicides, suggesting that reducing access could substantially reduce the death toll.
Between 2005 and 2008, Mel Blaustein, the then chief psychiatrist at St Francis Memorial hospital in San Francisco, saw people transferred to the emergency room after suicide attempts, including those brought there involuntarily. Blaustein remembers asking 63 individuals: “Why the Golden Gate Bridge?”
“The most common response was that it was fast and accessible. A second group described it as a romantic way of dying. And the third, they thought that a jump would be the easiest way to kill yourself,” said Blaustein, who remained a medical director at St Francis Memorial Hospital for over two decades and has advocated for a barrier.
Furthermore, Blaustein says, studies have shown that it is unlikely that people who are prevented from jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge will go on to do it somewhere else. One such study was conducted by Dr Richard Seiden, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose findings showed that the vast majority of people who attempted to jump off the bridge between 1937 and 1971 were either alive or had died of natural causes by 1978.
Another study conducted by Seiden, titled A Tale of Two Bridges, found that between 1937 and 1979, the Golden Gate Bridge recorded 672 suicides while the Bay Bridge – a nearby span of similar height completed six months before the Golden Gate – saw far fewer, at 121.
Following study after study, international landmarks such as the Empire State Building, Eiffel Tower, Berne cathedral in Switzerland and the Sydney Harbor Bridge implemented suicide barriers.
The first known suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge took place in 1937, just three months after it opened, when a 47-year-old first world war veteran named Harold Wobber leapt over the railing. But it would be decades before a deterrent system took shape. Calls for a suicide barrier accelerated in the mid-2000s, spurred in part by the release of a controversial documentary called The Bridge that used hidden cameras to film multiple deaths, putting widespread attention on the issue.
By 2008, the advocacy of people like Holmes and the Bridge Rail Foundation seemed close to paying off. In July of that year, a proposal for the stainless steel net was released for public feedback. But opinions among local residents were divided.
“Creating a suicide barrier on one of the most beautiful landmarks in the world is ridiculous. This is an ill-conceived idea and an unnecessary waste of money,” a Sunnyvale resident said in a letter to the district at the time.
A Bay Area columnist’s opinion piece, while empathizing with the agony endured by the relatives of those who “jumped to their death”, declared: “District directors should say ‘no’ to spending an estimated $40 to $50m on a barrier that will not and can’t eliminate all suicides.”
Despite the grumblings, in October 2008 the district’s board of directors voted to install the net under the span. However, it took another decade to formally begin the project with a budget of $217m, according to the bridge district.
Since then it has faced repeated construction delays. Shimmick Construction Co and Danny’s Construction Co, a joint venture leading the project, sued the district in 2022, alleging that late changes in the net design had resulted in at least $195m in increased costs.
In a statement to the Guardian, Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, the director of public affairs for the bridge district, said: “The claims in the lawsuit have no merit, and it is disappointing that the contractor is wielding self-induced project delays and corporate distractions as a cudgel to demand more money from our ratepayers and the public.”
Separately, the district said the agency was planning to hold a ceremony in early 2024 to mark the finished barrier. “In the meantime, we are focused on saving lives at the Golden Gate Bridge and look forward to the completion of the net at the end of the year.”
As the promised completion deadline looms, bridge workers continue construction under the span at night, when the pedestrian walkway is closed, in a final push to finish the project.
‘This is how we like to remember her’
Photographs and paintings made by Gabriela Aparicio adorned the home she lived in for 17 years.
In the living room, there’s a black-and-white photo, placed next to a portrait of her brother, that shows Gabriela feeding a horse and approaching it for a kiss on the forehead. It was taken over a decade ago, during a visit to a family farm 40 miles from Bogotá, Colombia, her paternal homeland.
During her childhood, Gabriela’s family traveled to Colombia every year so she could ride horses in vast fields surrounded by mountainous landscapes. She loved animals and nature, a passion she maintained into her teen years in California.
Sitting on her couch at home in Kentfield, a town in Marin county, Gabriela’s mother, Pamela Aparicio, opened a folder filled with her daughter’s drawings, collages and writings.
Among them was a folded copy of the Redwood Bark, the student newspaper at Gabriela’s high school in Marin. In the front-page article, Gabriela interviewed residents of the Greenbrae Boardwalk, a community of houses built over a mass of marshland, and reported on how they had adapted to extreme weather events that damaged their homes.
Pamela held a notebook with a cover depicting a desert fox and a Joshua tree that Gabriela had used to document a nine-day trip across Joshua Tree national park.
“In her junior year, she trained and went backpacking with a group of 20 students to work on leadership,” Pamela said. “She went 110% out there – she was in the best shape she’s ever been. She told me that was the best year of her life.”
Gabriela had plans for the future, her mother said. In the summer of 2013, as she prepared for her senior year, she visited colleges she was interested in attending. She wanted to become a marine biologist – a dream that didn’t seem farfetched for a straight-A student.
But on 29 August of that year, the 17-year-old jumped from the bridge. It was one of the deadliest years in recent decades.
Pamela pointed at a photograph in the living room of Gabriela with her favorite horse, the Andalusian. “This photograph will stay there for ever,” Pamela said. “This is how we like to remember her.”
Nearly a month after Gabriela’s suicide, Kyle Gamboa, 18, died at the site.
Hours before his death, his parents said, Kyle Googled “Golden Gate Bridge” and drove over 100 miles to the structure.
“He was a pretty outgoing kid. He played a lot of sports. He was currently playing soccer and getting ready for his basketball season,” Kymberlyrenee Gamboa said while sitting next to her husband, Manuel Gamboa Jr, at a coffee shop in Sacramento.
The day he died, Gamboa was expected to attend soccer practice. Instead, his teammates formed a circle around the team’s captain, who informed them that Kyle had passed away. They broke down in tears. To them, Kyle seemed like the last person who would take his own life.
Six years earlier, Matthew Whitmer was 20 years old and four months away from graduating from a massage therapy school when he drove from his home in Hercules 25 miles south to San Francisco. His family had already planned a trip to Belize once Matthew finished the program.
But on the early morning of 15 November 2007, Matthew got out of his car and walked toward the bridge. Shortly after, two women witnessed him jump. The coastguard searched for hours, but Matthew’s body was never recovered.
His family later searched his laptop, looking for a suicide note, and saw that Matthew had researched the Golden Gate Bridge and whether there was a suicide deterrent in place.
“He will always be a missing person,” said Dayna Whitmer, Matthew’s mother, in Hercules.
“Essentially, the bridge is his gravesite. I go back to the bridge and celebrate his life. It allows me to acknowledge that my Matthew is completely gone.”
Experts say there may be a stressor that at a particular point in time increases the risk of suicide. But if access to lethal means can be reduced, then deaths can be prevented and people can begin to heal.
“We can change the population level of suicide by helping people to understand that if you don’t have access to lethal means, no matter how bad you feel, you can’t kill,” Dr Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice-president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), said.
When a suicidal crisis passes, there’s an opportunity for intervention, Harkavy-Friedman added. To destigmatize suicide, it’s critical to ensure young people can speak up.
“It’s perfectly fine to say, ‘Are you thinking of killing yourself or are you thinking of ending your life?’ And that’s because if you’re too general, then you don’t necessarily know what you’re talking about. So I think it’s important to be direct.”
During Kyle’s funeral, the Gamboas welcomed classmates from Kyle’s high school, Sacramento’s Waldorf school, as well as people who came from as far as Utah to pay their respects.
“I never thought I would smile again. You can’t fake it, like everything’s OK, because it wasn’t. I didn’t do anything but go to work and come back,” said Kymberlyrenee, 61, a member of the California state guard (CSG) firefighter unit and a construction worker.
“Then I started looking on the internet for any kind of information, and that’s how I ended up finding out about the Bridge Rail Foundation. We contacted David Hull, asking ‘what can we do?’, and he said, ‘Go to a meeting.’”
At the public gatherings, the bridge district’s board of directors discussed issues and regulations pertaining to the bridge’s operations while the Gamboas and other families shared the stories of their loved ones and called for action. The Gamboas attended their first meeting in 2013, and have hardly missed any since.
“We would drive all the way to San Francisco to speak for a few minutes,” Manuel said, remembering one of the earliest meetings. “I would bring up questions about accountability – ‘Why are you throwing the problem under the rug? Why is it that you guys are not attempting to do something about this? Because if you could have, it might have saved my son’s life.’”
‘If my heart were a place’
Four years ago, I visited the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. I was astonished by its presence, its height and color, by the steady stream of cyclists and tourists and vehicles that shook the ground.
Half a mile into the walk, I paused to look over the edge as high winds passed through the railing. As I began writing my observations in a notebook, a man dressed in a dark blue uniform, worn by bridge patrol officers, asked if I was OK. “Where are you from? What do you do for a living? Where are you visiting from?”
Then the officer asked what I had written in my notebook, a question that made me uneasy. “I thought you were writing a suicide note,” he explained, visibly concerned.
It was a jarring experience, and a paradox that has stuck with me ever since. How can one of the most beautiful bridges in the world be one of the deadliest?
Walking across the bridge again this summer, I saw signs of that paradox everywhere. One of them, glued to a light pole, promoted a 24/7 crisis text line along with a reminder: “There is hope.” A telephone hotline with a red button said “push for help”. Another sign included a more stern warning: “The sidewalk is under television surveillance.”
I also spotted the partially constructed metal safety net under the sidewalk. Looking down, I recalled how a bridge officer had told me that jumping into the net could cause significant bruises and broken bones.
As construction continues, authorities try to prevent suicides through a system of cameras and foot-patrol officers who traverse the bridge, looking for signs of people in distress.
The bridge security department, which operates as part of the bridge district, was developed after 9/11, and its original priority was to thwart terrorist plots. But today it is also one of the main suicide deterrent efforts. The bridge captain, Roger Elauria, told me patrol officers were required to complete an average of 80 hours each of crisis intervention and de-escalation training.
According to numbers provided by the bridge district, from 2000 to October 2023, patrol officers have intervened in over 2,000 potential suicides. But they can’t save everyone – during that time period, at least 673 people jumped from the bridge and died.
Behind each of these suicides, there are also survivors and stories of resilience. Families, in spite of the many years, still remember the son, the daughter, the brother, the sister, the dear friend who jumped from the bridge and they wish they could see again.
In her living room, Heather Quisenberry reached for a wooden urn over the coffee table. It once held Alexander’s ashes, but, on that July afternoon, it stored childhood memorabilia: photographs of Alexander playing hide-and-seek, posing goofily with Mariah and swimming at a pool.
“He would buy me flowers and take me to the movies,” said Heather, looking at one of the few photographs she had of Alexander as a kid at her home in the city of Vallejo.
Following her son’s suicide, Heather found the answers for the when, the how and the where. The why remained inexplicable, however. “A suicide leaves a gap and I was depressed for so long, but I found meaning through tragedy,” she said through tears.
She researched Alexander’s mental health history and its potential association with suicide, trying to get closer to a reason. She realized she wanted to work with families who have lost children or loved ones to suicides, and is now a marriage and family therapist for fellow workers at Chevron in northern California.
As the sunlight pierced the curtains of the living room, Heather brought out a heavy cardboard box, laid it on the ground and began to unpack it. First, she took out paperwork that recounted the history of boarding-and-care homes where Alexander had lived. There were also college essays in which Alexander had written about growing up in a “non-structural family”. He mentioned the absence of a father figure and how difficult it must have been for Heather to live in the Bay Area as a single mom.
After a couple of hours spent reading every piece of paper that had Alexander’s handwriting, Heather sat on the ground silently, attempting to reconnect with her son. His writings, she said, did not exude a sense of pessimism or describe someone who had lost himself. On the contrary, she said, they showed that Alexander was in a lucid state of mind.
Suddenly, when it seemed that there wasn’t much left in the box, Heather found a small piece of paper. She stood up rapidly, as if getting ready to perform before a large audience.
She began reading aloud.
If my heart were a place,
I’d make it much bigger …
It was a poem Alexander had written in fifth grade. She closed her eyes and continued to recite the words by memory, without pausing, until the last verse.
If my heart were a place,
there would be
loving and sharing, kindness and laughter.
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. More resources are available via the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org.
