In the first five months of this year, 17 people jumped into the path of oncoming subway trains. A scheme to outfit stations with safety barriers is low on the TTC’s to-do list, leaving us with the ugly problem of how to stop suicides now
After his train ran over David Dewees, Kevin Pett took six months’ leave and underwent therapy. “A lot of drivers get angry after they’ve had a suicide,” he says. “I just shut down” (Image: Sandy Nicholson)
On Saturday October 3, 2009, at about eight o’clock in the morning, Kevin Pett, a subway operator, was on his usual Bloor-Danforth route, driving his train eastbound into High Park station. Pett, who is 38, solidly built and soft-spoken, had been working for the TTC for 12 years. On board that day were a few dozen passengers, and up ahead he noticed three people waiting on the platform. Entering the station, Pett was travelling at roughly 50 kilometres an hour and preparing to slow down.
Then he saw a man on the platform jump down in front of the train. Slim, with short brown curly hair and a soul patch, he moved so nimbly that Pett thought he was a teenager playing chicken. It looked as though he was going to run across the median to safety. Instead, he paused and laid down on the running rails, with his head on one track.
Pett knew operators who made it to retirement without hitting a jumper. He thought he’d be one of them. Even as the facts rapidly tumbled into place—the man wasn’t getting up, he wasn’t going to get up, he was trying to kill himself—Pett couldn’t believe he was about to hit someone. He blasted the horn, threw on the safety brake and braced himself. He was terrified.
The man looked up, and for a moment, they made eye contact. Pett noticed the jumper was shaking. Then it was over. “It was horrible,” he says. “I knew that I had just killed someone. It felt like a car going over railroad tracks.”
Pett called the transit control centre at Bathurst and Davenport and ran onto the platform to press the emergency button, which cuts power to the rails. A Priority One alert, the code for a suicide on the tracks, went out to staff. Meanwhile, the guard—the person at the back of the train who shuts the doors—evacuated the passengers and went car to car cranking the six handbrakes to stop the train from rolling. Passengers were told to proceed upstairs to the concourse, and witnesses were asked to wait to be interviewed by the police. Pett felt himself shivering and zipped up his jacket but couldn’t get warm. Within minutes, a transit supervisor, police, TTC constables and emergency services arrived. While paramedics removed the body from the tracks, Pett was questioned by the police: Was the man alone? Did he appear agitated? Was he pushed? Could it have been an accident? Where was he standing on the platform? How far from the wall? From the other passengers on the platform? After about 45 minutes, Pett was taken to a TTC office where he called his wife, Shelley, also a subway operator, who was at home getting ready for her 10 a.m. shift. “When I came to pick him up, he was so pale,” she says. “He was in shock.” She gave him a hug and got him a glass of water.
Only 60 per cent of people who jump die. Organs are destroyed, limbs are amputated or crushed, and hemorrhaging is extensive
The TTC has a policy not to release personal information about jumpers, so subway operators rarely find out the name of the victim, or their circumstances. But in Pett’s case, the death was newsworthy, so the TTC and the police released his name to the media: the man he hit was David Dewees, a 32-year-old teacher at Jarvis Collegiate. Two days before he died, Dewees had been charged with Internet luring and invitation to sexual touching involving minors. The case had been widely covered in the press, and so, too, was his death.
Pett developed what he called “an addiction to the news.” He was on the computer all the time, reading the papers, trying to find out everything he could about Dewees. He discovered that Dewees had taught English and Latin at Jarvis for six years and was adored by his students, that he performed as a tenor with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, and that he’d also been a volunteer counsellor at the Ontario Pioneer Camp in Muskoka since 1997. (Police allege that he had met two teenaged boys at the Christian camp and had later made inappropriate contact with them over the Internet between July 2008 and July 2009.) The charges against Dewees shocked his colleagues, who rushed to his defence. Students praised him on Web sites and in letters to newspapers. More than 1,000 people attended Dewees’s funeral at Runnymede United Church, including former campers. The principal at Jarvis delivered a eulogy.
As much as Pett wanted to forget what happened, he couldn’t stop thinking about the man who leapt in front of his train. For weeks afterwards, he had flashbacks, as many as three or four a day. “I kept seeing him jumping in front of me,” he says. The memory of meeting the man’s eyes haunted him. He’ll never know why Dewees chose suicide, whether he was guilty of the crimes he was charged with or falsely accused. “I can’t say what goes on in someone else’s head,” Pett explains. “But no one deserves to die like that.”
(Homepage thumbnail: Half my Dad’s Age, from the Toronto Life Flickr pool)
This is the laughable thing about the “jumper fence” on the Bloor Street Bridge. People will just find somewhere else to end it all.
August 10, 2010 at 9:07 am | by JayOf course Jay, that’s the spirit! Ahh, gotta love the defeatist approach.
Maybe they WILL find somewhere else to do it that won’t traumatize a guy who’s trying to do his job and has to sleep at night?
How awful would you feel being the guy driving the train…?
Let me guess, you’re probably the guy who would be all up in arms if his kid tripped or was pushed from the ledge. THEN you’d be pointing all kinds of fingers and talking about barricades, right?
I say put up the barricade and take away the readily available option of people making a spectacle of themselves on the worst possible stage.
August 10, 2010 at 10:47 am | by AnthonyThis is heart wrenching. I never knew the name of the TTC driver, but I’ve been praying for him ever since I heard of this tragedy. I will now pray for him and his wife by name.
August 10, 2010 at 1:18 pm | by ChristineCan you let David rest in peace, and stop using his suicide to sell your crap?
August 10, 2010 at 5:27 pm | by aq4we0tuerepeople who kill themselves don’t care what other people think or feel, that’s why they kill themselves. they don’t care what their family, friends or colleagues think – they only care about ending their own pain.
August 10, 2010 at 6:34 pm | by brendawhy can’t drivers slow down before they hit the platform and chug along until the end instead of barreling all the way to the other end? i’m sure the time delay is a “wash” since the whole system wouldn’t have to be shut down for hours after a collision.
August 12, 2010 at 8:38 am | by JulieBrenda obviously hasn’t had to console anybody suicidal.
August 12, 2010 at 9:55 am | by etienneJulie is correct!
August 12, 2010 at 10:36 am | by MichaelIf someone is suicidal, they will find a way to do it. Building barricades is a waste of money,(Danforth Bridge) use the dollars for programs to help prevent suicides and help people with depression. The TTC subway system is ridiculous, one issue, the whole system shuts down.
Build more subway routes, not streetcars!
Unless you have been victimized by a completed suicide, you don’t know.
Our Mental Health system is like a maze. We need to go back and see how suicidal people can be helped.
Talk to Survivors Support Program, Karen runs it. Perhaps if the experts are asked, the City will have better, accessible ways of dealing with it.
Just my thoughts as someone who has worked with the families of people who have committed suicide by any way or means.
Colleen
August 12, 2010 at 1:51 pm | by Colleenthe suicide barrier on the bloor bridge isn’t to prevent suicides, it’s to prevent jumpers from landing on the dvp.
August 12, 2010 at 4:18 pm | by adamJay, you didn’t read the article at all. Either that or you’re illiterate.
August 12, 2010 at 10:00 pm | by MarcyJULIE is right .THEY HAVE TO SLOWDOWN BEFORE THE HIT THE PLATAFORM AND YOU CAN KILL YOURSELF THERE.
GEORGE.
August 12, 2010 at 11:11 pm | by georgeJULIE is right .THEY HAVE TO SLOWDOWN BEFORE THE HIT THE PLATFORM AND YOU CAN NOT KILL YOURSELF THERE.
GEORGE.
August 12, 2010 at 11:12 pm | by georgeThis could have the makings of a successful reality show. Howie Mandel washing his hands in a portable sink on the platform yelling “have you got what it takes to make that LEAP OF FAITH.” You really have to love the attempts by the media to publish somber, caring stories about this issue. A little late isn’t it when the visceral, opportunistic, hit-em-between-the-eyes negative tsunami they bombard everyone with, is guaranteed to be a factor at work here. There’s bound to be a lot of people out there who just can’t take a never-ending gloom and despair pounding. Everything’s screwed…. the future sucks…. your country is falling apart….. the economy is bust….the cops are crooks…..the politicians are even worse….. That does it !!!! …..where’s the bridge ????? Take Me To The Bridge. This (society)is SO screwed-up, for every person who jumps, there must be another 10,000 giving it serious consideration.
August 13, 2010 at 9:29 am | by splatter-manI’d witnessed a TTC suicide “jump” myself. I (along with a couple of other people) was standing 10 feet away from the jumper, when it happened. I still remember all of it to this day, and it happened back in 1997!! It’s a horrific thing to see. I feel sad for the vehicle operators and others affected by such a tragedy.
August 15, 2010 at 3:54 pm | by pmb