Houston is an urban sprawl of epic proportions. On the "3rd coast” it is like the other large U.S. cities--NY, LA, Chicago in all the most awful and most wonderful ways. In 2010 the city itself was said to be almost 600 square miles with over 2 million people, but the metropolitan area which stretches out toward the Gulf of Mexico along relentless freeways sometimes stacked upon each other boasts about 6 million citizens. Not all of them nice. Many wealthy. Most smart. And now, post Katrina, huge numbers of transplanted and traumatized people who brought, in some places, danger, despair, poverty and rapid transformations of neighborhoods.
Many Houstonians felt their city had become sick when the Katrina transplants arrived at a conservative estimate of 150,000. Still today many believe that it has never recovered from the storm that didn’t hit its own coast. That was 2005. A lot of children have been born in that time and a lot of scattered refuge relatives have come to join the original transplants.
1984 suicides at Clearlake H.S.
I-45 lays itself out toward Galveston like an asphalt carpet. On a good day you race along it without a "sun alert" and with an amazing salt water breeze that takes the edge off the oppressive heat and humidity.
Bedroom communities’ line the freeway all the way to the Bay of Galveston from where commuters sought refuge from the city to live and grow their children and still travel daily into the glassy skyscrapers and the urban foothills of booming businesses to earn their keep. In 1984, Clearlake, one of these, bejeweled by NASA and all the brilliance and madness it imported, suddenly coughed up a dark side-effect of this man-made topography.
There was a ‘suicide epidemic’ among the teens whose parents and perhaps grandparents had sought the community for its manicured lawns, its planned neighborhoods and good schools.
In September and October of that year news broke that as many as thirty high school students had made a suicide pact. 6 died and the mental health community responded. Those were the ‘glory days’ of private mental health care. Prosperous companies like Exxon and Transco insured their employees and families with policies that had no lifetime maximums. Inpatient stays for children and adolescents could be years and for many they were.
The 6 teens who completed suicide were:
Darren Thibodeaux, 14,carbon monoxide
Gary Shivers, 16, hanging
Lisa Schatz, 15, hanging
Wesley Tiedt, 19, hanging
Sean Woods, 19, gunshot
Warren Kuns, 19, gunshot
Some say that a female student started the rumor of a suicide pact "as a lark" (New York Times) and that it became real.
The year prior Hurricane Alicia had made direct landfall on August 18th with winds reaching 115 mph. Alicia had a rare double eye and sailed through the city, slowing down a bit to look around at 80 miles an hour.
To give an idea of the devastation it caused, the Red Cross provided food and shelter to 63,000 at a cost of about $166 million. It was a category 3 hurricane that flooded Clear Lake setting the psychological stage for me when I first found out about this area. First, Alicia then a suicide epidemic, I thought, something very serious is going on here.
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