Inside a Suicidal Mind

After Grim Year, Md. Teen's Father Has Warnings

His only daughter is gone, and for much of the year since her suicide, Troy Crites has probed the unseen details of her life, hoping to understand what happened.

He has pored through diaries and other writings, a cache of e-mails, telephone records, even shopping receipts showing her purchases in the hours just before she died. He has come to see her anguish more clearly and how the events of one day turned so grim.

"I know so much more . . . but it's the wrong time for a parent to find out," he said.

It has been a year since Rachel Crites, 18, and her best friend, Rachel Smith, 16, were found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in the Crites family station wagon, parked in a remote area of Loudoun County near the West Virginia border.

In hopes of helping another family with a teenager in peril, Troy Crites, 50, has decided to tell her story -- to social workers, to the public. The way he sees it, too many children die without leaving clues behind. He wants to encourage parents to learn more about youth suicide and to intervene early to prevent tragedy.

"If we can use this to save another kid, then we should do that," he said in a recent interview at his Gaithersburg home. Rachel Crites's mother, Kathryn Cornelius, who lives in Italy, said in an e-mail that she supports his effort to help others through Rachel's story.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the 2004 suicide rate among people ages 10 to 24 was 7.32 per 100,000, an 8 percent increase over the previous year and the largest one-year jump in 15 years. Especially notable were increases for females 10 to 19 and males 15 to 19.

At the time of Rachel's death, the suicide seemed inexplicable to her family. Even though she had once attempted to take her life, she had responded to treatment: therapy, group therapy, medication. Two days before she went missing, Crites and his daughter watched "American Idol" together. They talked, and Rachel said she was doing well. "From external appearances, she seemed fine," he said.

The previous Saturday, father and daughter had strolled the campus of Montgomery College, where she took classes, and bought textbooks for the coming semester. Rachel wanted a career as a nurse.

"You think of a suicidal kid as being dark, depressed, Goth, angry. . . . My daughter was nothing like that," Crites said.

With the help of Joan Goodman, a clinical social worker in Rockville who specializes in treating adolescents, he has begun to understand more. "Just because you don't understand the suicidal mind doesn't mean it doesn't make perfect sense to them," said Crites, with whom Rachel lived.

In the end, he said, it seemed a random problem propelled two troubled girls toward the darkest of impulses.