Inside a Suicidal Mind
After Grim Year, Md. Teen's Father Has Warnings

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 6, 2008

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.

On a January day when school was out, the teenagers went out for bagels, made a stop for shampoo, then decided to go horseback riding in Anne Arundel County.

On the way there, they took a wrong turn and ended up at a gate near the National Security Agency. There was trouble.

The younger teen was cited for driving without a license and given a mandatory court appearance, Crites said. The older teen was cited for allowing her to drive and ordered to pay a $165 fine.

Unaware, Crites talked to his daughter by cellphone shortly after the ticket was issued. She seemed fine. But in the minds of the teenagers, he now believes, the event loomed large. Once before, they had been grounded and thus separated. "I think the ticket just freaked them out, the fear of being separated."

"They found in each other the nurturing they did not find elsewhere in life," he said. "They could not stand the idea of being apart."

Abandoning the idea of horseback riding, the two went to see the fantasy film "Eragon." There, in a Gaithersburg theater, he said, "I think they sat there and got scared. I think they decided."

It was after the movie, Crites would later learn, that the teens went three times to a Rockville gun store, trying to buy ammunition for one of several inherited firearms Crites had in a keepsake closet.

Later, they asked their parents for permission to have a sleepover, went to dinner together and watched the movie "Grease." Crites left for work the next day thinking all was well.

But the teenagers went for a fourth time to the gun store. Still unsuccessful, they went to Home Depot for a hose and duct tape. They drove to West Virginia.

In an isolated area out of view, the girls committed suicide -- that day, Crites believes. Their bodies went undiscovered for two weeks, despite an intensive search by family, friends, even strangers.

In the past year, Crites has thought a lot about what he might have done, and what other parents should know. As a starting point, he believes parents should be better informed about suicide.

In Rachel's case, he said, he wishes he kept closer tabs on her emotional state, going so far as to read her journals, especially after her first suicide attempt.

"If I had been better informed of the true risks . . . and if I had read all the things that were in there, I probably would have done something differently," he said.

Crites took the podium last week at a symposium held by Potomac Ridge Behavioral Health, which has a mental health hospital in Rockville. Attending were 100 social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists.

Crites said he told them about Rachel's difficulties surrounding her parents' divorce, her separation from her mother, her father's second divorce and her falling out with her stepmother. He shared some of Rachel's tormented writings.

Rachel had left a note saying she wanted to be buried beside her friend, whom she called her "true love." After all his probing, Crites said he does not think the teens had a romantic relationship, but rather a "nurturing love," which, he said, "I personally don't think . . . contributed to their demise."

At the symposium, Crites talked about how Rachel had been "a cutter," referring to the practice of drawing blood with a razor or knife. Cutters find comfort in physical pain, which is meant in part to blot out emotional pain, experts say.

Especially among teenage girls, cutting is a growing phenomenon.

Goodman, the Rockville social worker, who also talked at the event, said in a later interview that "cutting is clearly an epidemic. . . . It is coming out of the closet in the way that eating disorders came out of the closet in the '80s and '90s."

Adolescents, she said, are at risk for suicide partly because they are often impulsive, "with black and white thinking." When they feel pain, they lack the life experience to know it is transitory.

Any sort of event can be a trigger, she said. "The final thing that happens can be the straw that breaks the camel's back," she said.

For Crites, awareness is one part of a complex picture.

Parents, he said, need to insist on counseling when teens need it. He made the mistake of allowing Rachel to stop group therapy when she asked, he said. "Kids do not get to decide when they need counseling."

Another big issue, he said, is patient privacy rights, which make it hard for caregivers to share information. "Would it have happened differently if we had five people working together instead of five people working independently?" he asked.

Crites still finds it tough to be without the daughter he loved. He went out of town for the anniversary of when she was found: Feb. 2, 2007.

Rachel Smith's family did not return a call seeking comment.

"Two great kids -- not into drugs, not into drinking, wouldn't touch a cigarette," he said. "Great kids. You think they are safe."