Empire States

I was just reading about a lawyer who committed suicide by jumping out of a 69th floor window of the Empire State Building on Friday (the 13th). I don't know if the poor guy had lost a motion, a case, his job, or just his mind, but it reminded me of this 2003 NYer article about people who choose another suicide magnet -- the Golden Gate Bridge -- for their point of disembarkation from this life.

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before...

As he crossed the chord [the outermost beam of the bridge] in flight, [Ken] Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

The first "jumper" profiled in the article is an American guy of Iraqi descent who is so distraught at the prospect of civilian deaths in Iraq that he decides to end it all on the eve of "Shock and Awe." I wonder if, on the way down, he thought the Iraq situation was totally fixable and regretted his decision to jump. I wonder what he'd think about that now?