08.30.92, © St. Petersburg Times, My life is a whirl
On Saturday morning, the Fourth of July, Regina Wilson was sitting alone in the tollbooth surveillance room, working on her second cup of coffee. Her job is to monitor the 13 remote-control cameras that keep an eye on the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
She watches for accidents and breakdowns, anything that would disrupt traffic. It's not the most exciting job in the world.
Traffic was light at 9 o'clock, but Wilson knew from four years on the job that by midafternoon, the bridge would be jammed with cars and campers headed to Pass-a-Grille or Fort De Soto Park or one of the dozens of other beaches up and down the coast.
People were sleeping in, she thought. It's a holiday.
At two minutes after 9, Wilson noticed something on one of her screens. A pickup truck heading north had pulled into the emergency lane at the very top of the bridge. She watched as someone - she couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman - walked in front of the truck.
Engine trouble probably. Or another tourist. Even though several signs warn people not to stop on the bridge, the view from 192 feet above Tampa Bay is too much of a temptation. They pull over, and out come the Instamatics.
Wilson started to train one of the cameras on the pickup. If the person didn't get back on the road soon, she'd have to alert the Florida Highway Patrol.
But the phone rang. She looked away from her screen and picked up the receiver. It was a woman at Emergency Call Box 6, a few hundred yards down the road from the hump.
"She was frantic," Wilson recalled a few days later. "She said there was a man standing on top of the bridge with a rope around his neck."
The pickup.
This was no time to panic. She thanked the woman and quickly punched up the FHP on her direct line.
"But when I went back to the screen, he was gone.
"I brought my camera in and I could see him hanging over the side of the bridge. I thought to myself, `Oh, my God. He must have gone right up there, and he just did it.' "
The only thing she could think of was to call her supervisor.
"But it was too late; we couldn't do anything," she said, her voice trailing off. "And that's what makes you feel so bad.
"I've seen serious car accidents with fatalities," she added, "but never anything like this.
"There just wasn't anything anybody could've done."
Several cars stopped and people got out and leaned over the side to get a better look. But within minutes, police and rescue units from three counties and the Highway Patrol had arrived. They sent the curious on their way and tried to figure how to get the man down.
Police found no suicide note in the pickup, only an empty box lying on the front seat. It had come from a hardware store and had contained a 25-foot nylon Mooring and Dock line.
Because of high winds on the bridge, it took a St. Petersburg Fire Rescue unit more than two hours to attach another rope to the Mooring and Dock line and lower Charles Deering Jr.'s body into a boat.
No one knows what was in Chuck Deering's mind that morning or why he chose to carry out such a calculated, desperate act in such a public place. All anyone knows for sure is how he spent the last hour of his life.
About 8 a.m., Chuck, a 24-year-old landscaper and father of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter, left his apartment in Sarasota. A friend spoke to him briefly and remembers that he was angry over the recent breakup of his marriage.
He got in his 1983 blue Chevy S-10 pickup. He was wearing a light green T-shirt, denim shorts and white high-top sneakers. The 38-mile drive to the Skyway took him about 45 minutes - a long time to think.
He paid the $1 toll and drove onto the bridge. At the center of the span, just past the sign that reads No Stopping Or Standing On Bridge, he pulled over.
He left the keys in the ignition, got out and walked to the back of the truck. He tied one end of the 25-foot Mooring and Dock line to the rear bumper. He tied the other end around his neck.
The rope secure, he walked a few feet to the 4-foot cement retaining wall and hoisted himself up.
In front of him, on the eastern horizon, were the waters of Tampa Bay and the rising summer sun. Thunder clouds were forming far in the distance. The breeze was strong and warm.
Several cars passed behind him, including one that would stop at Emergency Call Box 6.
It was too late.
Chuck Deering was the 60th person to jump off the Skyway bridge - and the first to hang himself.
He died instantly from a broken neck.
Linda Deering is sitting in the living room of her Port Charlotte duplex. Snapshots of her son are spread out across the coffee table. In the middle is a pink Mother's Day card. It has a picture of flowers on it and a lace border. Inside, the card is signed:
For my Wonderful Mom.
Chuck and family.
Linda is looking at the pictures and wringing her hands. Also in the room is Chuck's 15-year-old brother, Raymond, and his stepfather, Frank Pugh.
Linda doesn't know where to start.
She says Chuck was born in McHenry, Ill. The family moved to Sarasota in 1970. At the time, her husband, Charles Deering Sr., was a sergeant serving in Vietnam.
Chuck was a happy, likable boy - active in the 4-H Club, a strong swimmer and a promising first baseman on a Little League baseball team.
The Deerings were divorced in 1981, when Chuck was 14. Linda had to raise Chuck and Raymond alone. It wasn't easy, but she managed.
At 16, Chuck quit school and went to work fulltime as a cook at a fast-food restaurant in Venice. At the end of each week, he gave his mother his paycheck.
Three years later, he started laying block for a construction company. He was making enough money to buy a motorcycle, but Linda laid down the law.
"I told him as long as he lived here, he couldn't have a motorcycle. I told him I hated them, that I almost lost my leg on one.
"He said, `Well, Mom, I'm just going to have to go out on my own.' I didn't want him to go, but he was 20. It was about time."
In 1987, on one of the lonely back roads off U.S. 41 in Port Charlotte, Chuck ran a stop sign and was hit by a car. He was in a coma for 17 hours, and his left leg and foot were badly mangled. It took six operations to save his leg.
He couldn't go back to construction work, so he got a job as a landscaper at Island Reef Condominiums on Siesta Key.
At about that time, he met Cindy Gray. He was 21, she was 20.
They got married in 1989 and moved in with Cindy's parents in Sarasota. About a year later, they had a daughter, Danielle.
From all accounts, they were a typical young family trying to raise a child, keep the in-laws happy and scrape together the money to buy their first house.
And then things started to change.
It was in April or May, Linda Deering said, that Chuck stopped taking Raymond fishing. Then he stopped calling Linda at work. She doesn't have a home phone, so he had kept in touch through the drugstore in Venice where she works as a sales clerk.
When Chuck called Thursday morning, July 2, Linda was excited to hear from him again. But he had never sounded so upset. He said the thing he valued most - his family - was falling apart.
"He was crying," Linda said. "He said Cindy took Danielle and left. I asked him why. He said she chose to go back home and she was going to go back to school."
Toward the end of the conversation, Chuck's mood changed. He told Linda he was "going to get even with everybody."
He wouldn't explain what he meant.
When he called her again on Friday morning, Linda told Chuck that he could come back home to live, but he said no.
"He slowly changed the subject and said, `Things are looking up, though,' " she remembered. He said he was meeting Cindy to talk about getting back together.
When Linda didn't hear from Chuck that weekend, she assumed the couple had done just that.
"I thought they were kissing and making up," she said.
It wasn't until Monday - two days after Chuck drove to the bridge - that Linda learned what really happened that weekend.
Steve Kreger looked up from the sprinkler he was adjusting at the Island Reef Condominiums, a sweeping, 10-acre complex on Siesta Key in Sarasota, and tried to come up with an answer.
Kreger, the condo manager, said Chuck took care of the pool and supervised the landscaping for the last three years. He had planted everything - the sea grapes and geraniums and pampas grass - and he was proud of his work.
Chuck got to work early and stayed late, all the condo owners liked him and he was always in a good mood.
"Except the last week or so," Kreger added.
"We never knew it had gotten so bad for him."
Apparently nobody knew.
In a shed at another part of the complex, Bob Hancox and Tim Winquisd were putting their edgers and trimmers away for the day. Tim had been fairly close to Chuck, but Bob had been one of his best friends. They had known each other since the 10th grade at Venice High School.
Tim and Bob said Chuck didn't use drugs, and if he drank, it was usually no more than a few beers. They said he was an honest, hard-working guy who loved rock 'n' roll, fishing and bowling every Thursday and Friday night at Galaxy Lanes.
And they said Chuck was fine until he began having marital problems.
"He talked earlier in the week about how he couldn't live without her," Tim said. "He talked about suicide, but he told me he wouldn't really do it."
They said they didn't take him seriously because Chuck had talked a lot about death after the motorcycle accident.
"You know how some people talk about being on the other side and how peaceful it is?" Tim asked. "Well, Chuck said that a couple of times. I guess he liked it better there."
They also said Chuck had a fascination with the Skyway bridge.
"He asked us a couple of times if we thought he could live if he jumped off," Tim said. "We'd ask him if he'd really do it, and he said no. We just kind of shrugged it off."
On Thursday night, July 2, Chuck tried to get Cindy back by pretending to commit suicide.
Cindy Deering would not talk to a reporter for this story. But according to her statements in a police report, she said Chuck told her he had taken sleeping pills.
"It was his last ploy, as he called it," Bob said.
But Chuck's plan began to unravel, according to the report, when he said he didn't want anyone to call an ambulance. The next day, he admitted to Cindy that his suicide attempt was a trick. He had actually flushed the pills down the toilet.
In the report, Cindy said that incident was the first time Chuck had mentioned suicide to her, and that she never thought he would kill himself.
When he went to work Friday morning, Chuck was unusually quiet. He told Bob the separation was final.
"He knew me and Tim were mad at him for doing something stupid," Bob said. "I told him they could put him away by the Baker Act for doing something like that."
Although Cindy and Danielle had moved out, Chuck continued to live in the four-bedroom apartment they shared with another couple, John and Cindy Kale.
"When Cindy left, Chuck just kept saying, `I can't believe this. I can't believe this is happening.' " Cindy Kale recalled.
When she knocked on Chuck's door Friday night to check on him, there was no answer. She assumed he was asleep.
In the morning, Cindy Kale heard Chuck leave the apartment. It was about 8 o'clock, the Fourth of July.
She caught up with him at his truck.
"He was real angry," Kale said. "I asked him, `Chuck, are you all right?'
"He said, `I'm fine. I have to go. Bye.'
"And he drove away."
Later that day, after police told them about the suicide, Tim and Cindy Kale went through Chuck's room.
They found a section of rope fashioned into a noose.
They also found a note wadded up and tossed behind one of his stereo speakers. They could only make out a few lines. One was, My life is a whirl.
The Sunshine Skyway with its stark, geometric beauty is a magnet of sorts, a beacon for the desperate.
Before Chuck Deering's suicide, 59 people had jumped off either the old or the new span since the bridge opened in 1954, according to Times records. Remarkably, nine of those 59 people survived, including a man who jumped off a lower section of the new span and wound up spending four days on a small island before he was rescued.
The highest point is 192 feet above the water. A fall from that height would result in an impact so great that it would likely kill a person or knock him unconscious, which would lead to drowning.
Since the new span opened in April 1987, eight people have leaped to their deaths. Another seven have been talked out of jumping by law enforcement or bridge officials. Among them was a 38-year-old Vietnam veteran who sat on the wall with a six-pack of beer for four hours before he came away from the edge. He said he was despondent that he couldn't visit his son, who was living with his ex-wife.
Then there was the 39-year-old man who was talked down with the promise of a cigarette. He had threatened to kill his wife and children and had led police on a high-speed chase. On another occasion, a state trooper and a Department of Transportation employee grabbed a man off the wall and pulled him to safety. He said he was upset over the loss of his girlfriend and his job.
Chuck Deering was young and in good health. He had a job he liked, he didn't abuse alcohol or drugs, he had no criminal record, and he wasn't deeply in debt.
And although his marriage was coming apart, many men and women go through similar emotional turmoil without becoming self-destructive.
His friends and co-workers, Bob and Tim, said Chuck had a reputation for not following through with what he said he would do. "I think because nobody thought he'd do it, he did it," Tim said.
They also said the motorcycle accident changed him. And in fact, those who emerge from a coma are often left with physical, emotional or developmental problems.
But Linda Deering thinks the accident had nothing to do with why Chuck took his life. She insists that losing his family is what killed him. "He died of a broken heart," she said.
And that, say mental health experts, is a very real possibility.
"Relationship breakups are significant because we use them as a support system, and when we lose that, we have nobody to turn to," said Dr. Dale Hicks, associate director of the University of South Florida's Counseling Center for Human Development. "In this case, the person was despondent. Depression is the most important warning signal. People tend to commit suicide when they don't see any alternatives. They feel hopeless.
"And when people are feeling depressed, it narrows their thinking. It impairs their ability to problem solve, so that they may not be able to recognize solutions."
Suicide is hardly a rare occurence. It crosses all cultural and economic boundaries. More than 30,000 people killed themselves in 1989, the latest year for which statistics are available. The true number of suicides is probably higher, experts say, because some deaths that are ruled accidental - a one-car crash, for instance, with no witnesses - are actually suicides.
Although women attempt or threaten suicide more than men, men are four times more likely to complete the act. And men age 20-24 (Deering was 24) have the highest suicide rate of any group under age 65.
Most people who attempt suicide give hints to the people around them. They may give away valued possessions or make statements such as, "I'd be better off dead."
"Almost anyone is capable of committing suicide under certain conditions," Hicks added. "But there are variables that help predict it - someone who abuses drugs or alcohol, someone with low self-esteem who comes from a dysfunctional family, someone who is not good at problem solving, someone who tends not to see things through, to quit and give up. Suicide is similar to giving up rather than working through something.
"Also, if we know someone has attempted suicide in the past or has a family history of suicide or emotional instability, that's another factor to consider."
Not everyone with these symptoms carries through on a suicide attempt, however.
"It's easy for the survivors to feel guilty afterward, but it's difficult at the time to know when to take action and when not to," Hicks explained. "And there is a limit to the responsibility a friend or a loved one can take."
One of the ways Floridians can take action is through the Baker Act. The law works like this: If a person thinks a friend or relative is a danger to himself or others, that person can petition a circuit court judge to have the friend or relative undergo psychiatric evaluation. Although the suspicion must be proved, if the judge agrees he can commit the subject to a mental health facility, usually for a minimum of 72 hours.
No one took that extreme step in Chuck Deering's case.
As for why Deering would choose such a public death - hanging himself from one of the most prominent landmarks in the state - Hicks could offer only this:
"Taking one's life is a significant event, and often people will chose a place or means that has significance to them.
"Or one that makes some kind of a statement."
On Monday morning, two days after her son's death 70 miles to the north, Linda Deering was going about life as usual.
Investigators had told Chuck's wife about the suicide, but no one had passed that word on to Linda.
She went to work at 9:30 just like always. Her co-workers seemed unusually quiet, but she shrugged it off.
An hour later, a police officer came in the store and asked whether they could talk privately. They went into a small storeroom in the back. He told her Chuck had been in an accident.
That's as far as he got.
"He didn't say it," Linda whispered, "but when he said that, I knew Chucky was dead."
She screamed and tried to run. Anywhere. It took two co-workers to hold her down.
The next thing Linda remembered was her husband, Frank, driving her to a pay phone. She had to call her sister, Georgine, who had helped raise Chuck. One of Georgine's first questions was how Chuck had died.
Linda suddenly realized she didn't know.
The answer was sealed in an envelope a co-worker had given Frank. She ripped it open. Inside was a newspaper account of Chuck's death. Her co-workers had seen the article but didn't know how to tell her.
Linda became hysterical. Frank had to push her into the car and drive her home.
"When we got home, Raymond (her younger son) wasn't here," Linda said, tears streaming down her face. "And I was like a lunatic. I couldn't find my Raymond. I'm up and down the street looking for him. Finally, I found him and I told him and we cried.
"I couldn't stay here. I kept driving all over the place. Driving and driving."
Late that night, when Linda went into Raymond's room to check on him, she found him asleep, hugging a picture of his brother.
More than a month has passed since Chuck's death, and Linda is coping as best she can. Sometimes she can't bring herself to go to work. Sometimes she finds herself crying in the middle of the day.
What haunts her the most is wondering how isolated and alone her oldest son must have felt the last few days of his life.
"If I had known," she said, "I would have brought him home and talked to him and maybe had him admitted to a hospital.
"But I can't do that now."
There was a long silence before she spoke again.
"I've cried every night since then."
FOR HELP Help is available, if you need it. Here are some numbers for crisis intervention and suicide counseling throughout the Tampa Bay area. In a crisis, call 911 if no other aid is available: Pinellas Emergency Mental Health 791-3131 (24 hours) Family Resources Help Line 531-4664 (24 hours) Hillsborough Crisis Line 238-8821, 238-8822 or 238-8823 (24 hours) Pasco Family Resource Help Line, New Port Richey 848-5555, Central Pasco 228-8686, Dade City (904) 567-1111 (8:30 a.m.-7:30 p.m. M-F) Human Development Center West Pasco 848-5322; East Pasco 782-3538 (24 hours) Hernando County Mental Health Center (904) 796-9496 (24 hours) Citrus Marion-Citrus Mental Health Inc. (904) 628-5020 (24 hours) Manatee Crisis Line 748-8585 (24 hours) Sarasota Coastal Recovery Center 364-9355 (24 hours) Sarasota Memorial HelpLine 921-8888 (24 hours) Sarasota Palms Crisis Center 365-0101 (24 hours)