Suicides

Officers throughout the Los Angeles Police Department grieved Tuesday as news spread that a veteran detective had killed herself in the lobby of an L.A. County Sheriff's Department station Monday night. Susan J. Clemmer, a well-regarded officer assigned to the LAPD's Gang and Narcotics Division, walked into the Santa Clarita sheriff's station about 9:15 p.m. and spoke to the sheriff's deputy at the front desk, according to sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore and LAPD officials.

Under mottled gray skies, Caltech students graduated Friday in a ceremony punctuated by a moment of silence for two of their colleagues who died in separate suicides in the weeks before commencement. Senior Jackson Ho-Leung Wang, a mechanical engineering student from Hong Kong, died in his dorm room less than 48 hours before he was to collect his diploma in front of Beckman Auditorium on the Pasadena campus, officials said.

On a clear day, the expanse of blue ocean seen from the living room of this San Clemente home seems almost endless. Sometimes, as day gives way to evening, a line of pink stretches like a crayon scrawl in the sky. When night falls, the sea is an abyss of black. Margrit Ucar fell instantly for the panorama. Even before her husband, Manas, had a chance to see the house, she knew it was where they would raise their two young daughters, twins Margo and Grace.

Psychologists and Buddhist monks have come to console workers. There is a suicide hotline, piped-in music and a stress-release center where workers are invited to hit a punching bag with a picture of their supervisor. But so far, nothing and nobody have been able to stop the suicides at Foxconn Technology Group, which manufactures Apple's iPhones as well as Dell and Hewlett-Packard components in Shenzhen in southern China. The latest worker to commit suicide jumped to his death Tuesday.

The small squares of colored paper began cropping up on the doors and walls of Henry M. Gunn High School last week, two days after William Dickens, 16, killed himself on the nearby train tracks. "Just keep swimming," one Post-it note said. "There is always someone who will listen," was written on another. And, "There's no meaning to happiness w/o sadness. Take it easy." Dickens was the fourth Gunn student in less than six months to commit suicide near where East Meadow Drive crosses the Caltrain tracks here in the affluent, high-achieving heart of the Silicon Valley.

A 43-year-old patient at a troubled state-run psychiatric hospital has died in what appears to be a suicide, coroner's officials said Friday. Augie Solez, who was in long-term commitment at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, was found unresponsive at 11:34 a.m. Thursday, said San Bernardino County Sheriff's spokeswoman Sandy Fatland. He appeared to have hanged himself, Fatland said, but an autopsy has not been completed and a cause of death has yet to be determined.

A judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own lives. Judge Dorothy McCarter ruled late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer.

After two decades of decline, the suicide rate in Great Britain began rising in 2008, mystifying researchers. Now, a new study finds that that nation's financial crisis may help explain the sudden reversal, linking rising unemployment geographically with hikes in suicides. Writing in the British Medical Journal, a team of public health researchers found that between 2008 and 2010, Great Britain's worsening financial crisis and rising unemployment rate coincided with almost 1,000 suicides above expected levels.