An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

ordinary people. As a result, those in rural agricultural areas resort to the method used by around 30 percent of the suicides committed in the world every year, and one of the most painful: drinking pesticides.

      As might be expected, jumpers are much more common in densely populated cities known for their skyscrapers. The cities with the most high-rise buildings are also the cities with the highest proportions of jumping suicides. In Singapore, for example, 72 percent of suicides are jumpers; in Hong Kong, the figure is 50 percent; in New York, 23 percent. If you live in a town with no buildings higher than five stories, you are advised to select an alternative method. Suicide guidelines from the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die advocacy group, suggest that if your town has few buildings higher than four or five floors, jumping might not be the best way of taking your own life, since such relatively low leaps are not always fatal. If you have no choice but to jump from a fourth or fifth floor, the guidelines suggest, you should try to land on your head in order to maximize the chances of brain hemorrhage—the most frequent cause of death for suicidal jumpers. Gruesome as this may sound, according to physicist and philosopher Sascha Vongehr, in a blog entry devoted to the science of suicide, the half-second delay between brain receptor activity and awareness of experience means that the jumper dies before the impact of the landing. This speculation, obviously, cannot be confirmed.

      While six floors should be enough to kill you, a drop of at least ten floors is advisable. In such circumstances, you do not have to concern yourself about what part of your body hits the ground first, assuming you have an adult body weight and that you land on a solid surface. Of course, there have been bizarre and miraculous exceptions—people have survived falls from airplanes without parachutes, while others have died after tripping over their shoelaces.

      Yet are not all individuals exceptions to the statistical average? The French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed so. In his famous book on the subject, he wrote that “each victim of suicide . . . gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.” To make sense of the death of Rey Rivera, we must ask what the detective Auguste Dupin in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” describes as “the proper question in cases such as this,” which is “not so much ‘what has occurred?’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before?’ ” For detailed particulars, the best place to begin is the autopsy report.

      According to this document, Rivera hit the ground feet first. He had rather less external damage than one might expect after a fall of 118 feet, no doubt because his fall was broken around twenty feet from the ground, when he crashed through the roof of the former swimming pool. Still, the report makes nightmarish reading. These are the injuries found on Rivera’s body: two cuts to the forehead, one of which is four inches long; fractures to the nose and jaw; four ejected teeth; fractures to the cheekbone; multiple fractures to the skull from the top of the spine to the eye sockets, resulting in a brain hemorrhage; torn neck muscles, leading to further hemorrhage; cuts and bruises to the chest; two fractures to the collarbone; twenty-four broken ribs, which have punctured the heart and lungs and damaged the liver; a broken pelvis; cuts and tears to the right groin and testicle; many cuts and bruises on the torso in addition to two enormous lacerations on either side, one nine by seven inches long, and the other nine by four; torn skin on the front and back of the arms; legs cut so badly that muscles and tendons can be seen; the right leg broken in two places, with bone protruding through the skin.

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      THE EVIDENCE SUGGESTS that Rivera died not long after he disappeared. The medical examiner told Allison that his stomach cavity contained a residue of brown matter, presumably the potato chips he ate before leaving home around four p.m. Since he did not pay the parking attendant, he must have arrived at the parking lot sometime after six that evening, which is when the attendant goes home. If the crash D. and I heard around ten was the sound of Rivera falling through the roof, that leaves six hours between the time he left home and the time of his fatal plunge.

      At some point in those six hours, he found his way to the roof of the Belvedere without being seen. The roof is not easy to get to, even for those familiar with the building. Twice, when we first moved in, I went up there to sunbathe. In doing so, I was effectively trespassing, since the roof is definitely out of bounds. It’s a dangerous place. A single thin iron railing immediately opposite the access door is the only barrier against the drop. When I lay down and closed my eyes, the edge of the building always felt much closer than it was, though it was never really very far away. It was too hot and scary and uncomfortable to stay up there for long. Both times, when I got up after lying in the sun, I found myself overwhelmed with dizziness, and had to sit down until I had recovered my balance.

      The roof is reached via a ladder in the attic, but the attic is hard to find. There are two ways to get there. One is through a door, accessible only to staff, at the back of the 13th Floor nightclub. The other way is through a door in the service area next to the kitchens on the twelfth floor, which is also off-limits. This door is marked “No Entry.” A resident’s key card is needed in order to take any of the building’s four elevators, but even the card will take you only to the tenth floor. To go any higher, the elevator must be unlocked by the concierge.

      From the attic, however, the ladder that leads to the roof is not difficult to find. The rest of the attic space is taken up by the elevator mechanisms, heating and cooling ducts, insulated pipes, fuse boxes, storage areas, and a loft space lit by a dusty glass skylight. When I was up there, someone had put a table and two chairs in this space; on the table were a pack of cards and an ashtray full of stale butts. There was also a dead fern hanging from the rafters in a plastic pot. I wondered whether the bartenders or cleaning staff were using the loft as a place to relax or nap between shifts. Farther back was a narrow hallway leading to a series of small, low-ceilinged rooms where the hotel’s staff once slept.

      According to the police report, “it was determined that the roof was accessible.” I do not know where this information came from or what it means, but it is true that in 2006, when Rivera found his way to the roof, the elevator was often left unlocked, many of the fire doors were not alarmed, the security cameras didn’t always work, and the bartenders at the 13th Floor would go up to the roof to smoke, so the roof access door was usually left unlocked.