A desert where suicide thrives

HENDERSON, NEV. —  After it happened, Megan Beza was consumed with figuring out why. Did her husband’s struggle with painkillers play a role? His months of fruitless job-hunting?

But with suicide, there are rarely tidy answers. What is known is that southern Nevada’s unusually high suicide rate spiked with the recession, and Megan thinks that must explain, at least in part, what happened the morning of Oct. 25, 2010.

John Beza had just returned from dropping off their 4-year-old son, Jacob, at preschool. Megan was taking a bath.

“I’m going to the doctor,” John told her.

“Why?”

“I don’t feel good.”

“What hurts?”

John, usually easygoing, snapped.

“I just don’t feel good!”

The couple bickered, and John knocked Megan’s cellphone into their large Roman tub. He stormed out. Megan wrapped herself in a towel and rushed after him. In their bedroom she heard something rustle.

“John?”

She tried to open the walk-in closet. Locked. John slid his cellphone to her under the door. She heard a click. Then a loud bang.

“JOHN!”

Megan somehow kicked through the bottom of the door. John was sprawled on his back, the .357 Magnum they’d bought for protection still in his hand. The bullet had passed through his head and punched a hole in the ceiling. Megan called 911, and a dispatcher tried to tell her how to clear his airways of blood.

John’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell, then stopped.

He was 39.

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Long before the recession saddled Nevada with the country’s top foreclosure and unemployment rates, the Silver State wrestled with another measure of despair. For about three decades, the state’s suicide rate -- most recently 19.1 deaths per 100,000 residents -- has been among the nation’s highest. The national average is 12 per 100,000.

Most of Nevada’s suicides occur around Las Vegas, where nearly three-fourths of the state’s population lives. A study by sociologist Matt Wray and his colleagues found that between 1979 and 2004, the odds of suicide among Vegas residents were about 50% greater than in other large metropolitan areas.

Statistically speaking, leaving Las Vegas was enough to lessen the chance of someone taking his or her life.

Suicide remains a relatively rare form of death in the United States. Certain cultural factors can heighten the risk, and some of those are essentially the building blocks of modern Las Vegas.

The insta-neighborhoods of the once-fast-growing region offer newcomers little sense of community, and strong social ties help whittle down the likelihood of suicide.

Nevada’s go-it-alone, frontier ethos is another possible contributor, researchers say.

The majority of suicides involve firearms. And while it’s easy to buy a gun here, a lean-government mentality has curbed access to mental health care, a significant factor in cutting suicide risk.

Las Vegas also may draw people more likely to kill themselves -- those struggling with addiction, mental health problems or failed relationships. People grasping for second or third chances.

“It’s certainly been the mythology that this is where people came to reinvent themselves,” said Wray, a Temple University associate professor who spent years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About one-tenth of people who commit suicide in Clark County each year do not have local identification, suggesting they were newcomers or possibly visitors who traveled to Las Vegas for the same reason others visit the Golden Gate Bridge: to end their lives.

In the first few years after 2000, the number of suicides in Clark County remained relatively steady, about 300 a year.

Then the recession struck.

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Megan struggled to explain to their son what had happened: “Daddy went to heaven,” she told Jacob. “His brain was sick.” Then she settled into something of a fog, retracing her relationship with John repeatedly, searching for clues.

The two had met in 2001 while racing dirt bikes. He was divorced with two sons, and blushed when someone suggested he take Megan dancing. The next night, they played pool instead. He walked Megan to her car and kissed her hand.

“We were pretty much inseparable after that,” said Megan, a 37-year-old with blue-gray eyes and a cherubic face.

They called each other “baby,” loved camping and the ocean, and had paintings made for each other with maritime themes. They spruced up a stucco house in suburban Henderson.

John had long worked with his hands, installing cooling and heating systems. Not long after Jacob was born in 2006, the work started to dry up. The foreclosure crisis slashed the need for new homes, while the recession emptied hotel rooms. In 2007, John broke his right collarbone but kept putting off surgery.

“He didn’t want to show any weakness,” Megan said.

In 2009, John was laid off for the first time. Megan tried to comfort him. She was working at Lockheed Martin, and they had some money socked away.

“I don’t ever want to come home and tell you I can’t support our family,” John replied.

After a few weeks, he was hired to work on a new airport terminal. But on July 15, 2010, John walked into the house grim-faced.

“Today was my turn,” he told his wife.

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In 2006 and 2007, Clark County recorded about 350 suicides, according to the coroner’s office. In 2010, there were 405, including John Beza.

Suicide rates tend to fluctuate by no more than 3% a year in a large metropolitan area, researcher Wray said. “When it moves 10%, it’s like, OK, that was a quake.”

While no one can make a definitive link, one possible cause of the high number is Clark County’s stubborn unemployment rate. By 2009, it had soared above 14%, and it has yet to dip back below 12%. Several studies have shown that prolonged joblessness heightens the chance of suicide.

When researchers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently crunched nearly 80 years’ worth of data, they found the suicide rate per 100,000 Americans generally shot up when the economy was sluggish, mainly among working-age adults.

For someone already at risk of suicide, the loss of income or sense of purpose could add another, seemingly insurmountable burden, much like divorce or a child’s death. “Is that when hopelessness becomes overwhelming? Perhaps,” said Timothy Classen, a health economist at Loyola University in Chicago, who has also studied suicide.

He said workers in an industry that has been decimated are particularly vulnerable. That could well apply to the once-robust construction industry in Las Vegas, which shed 65,900 jobs -- a 62% drop -- since December 2005, according to the Associated General Contractors of America.

Considering Nevada’s long-running struggle with suicide, said David Stern, president of the advocacy group Mental Heath America, “it’s like you had a horrible accident ... and then other people kept running into the cars.”

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After John Beza’s second layoff, he grew more subdued, more easily frustrated. He woke up gasping from dreams he refused to describe to Megan.

Still, she had no reason to think John might harm himself. From what she knew, he’d never suffered from depression. There was no history of suicide in his family.

In September 2010, Megan was laid off too. The next month, trying to make the best of their empty days, the family drove to the California coast. They took Jacob whale-watching and to Sea World.

“Mom, Dad, I don’t want to leave!” he said on the last day.

To Megan’s surprise, John teared up.

“I don’t want to go, either.”

After John died, Megan discovered that he had been doctor-shopping for Lortab, the painkiller he was prescribed after he broke his collarbone.

Megan found prescriptions John had acquired from five or six doctors over time, including one written for her after she had a miscarriage. Megan was wary of painkillers, convinced they were addictive. Maybe that’s why John hid them from her.

The coroner’s office told her that, at the time of his death, John’s system was clean. Megan thought of how in the weeks before, he’d been agitated and complained of chest pains. Was he going through withdrawal along with everything else?

After Megan found a support group for survivors of suicide victims, she learned that there were no definitive answers. Even families of people who’d written goodbye notes still wrestled with questions.

Last fall, Megan was hired back at Lockheed Martin. She and Jacob remain in their home, where the good memories outweigh one terrible one. Megan keeps John’s ashes in a cherry wood box carved with a picture of the sailboat they long talked about buying. She and Jacob recently sprinkled some in the Bear River in Idaho, where John and Jacob had gone fishing.

Now, when thoughts creep into her head of John’s last morning, Megan tries to think of something else. Their wedding day. Jacob’s birth. The moments John looked happy -- before life went sour.

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