Priority One: suicides on the subway tracks—how many, how often and how to stop them

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 By Rachel Giese

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)

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