Meltdown Madness: The Human Costs of the Economic Crisis

The body count is still rising. For months on end, marked by
bankruptcies, foreclosures, evictions, and layoffs, the economic
meltdown has taken a heavy toll on Americans. In response, a range of
extreme acts including suicide, self-inflicted injury, murder, and
arson have hit the local news. By October 2008, an analysis
of press reports nationwide indicated that an epidemic of tragedies
spurred by the financial crisis had already spread from Pasadena,
California, to Taunton, Massachusetts, from Roseville, Minnesota, to
Ocala, Florida.

In the three months since, the pain has been migrating upwards. A growing number of the world's rich have garnered headlines for high profile, financially-motivated suicides. Take the New Zealand-born "millionaire financier" who leapt in front of an express train in Great Britain or the "German tycoon" who did much the same
in his homeland. These have, with increasing regularity, hit front
pages around the world. An example would be New York-based money
manager Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet, who slashed his wrists
after he "lost more than $1 billion of client money, including much, if
not all, of his own family's fortune." In the end, he was yet another
victim of financial swindler Bernard Madoff's $50 billion Ponzi scheme.

An unknown but rising number of less wealthy but distinctly well-off workers in the financial field have also killed themselves
as a result of the economic crisis -- with less press coverage. Take,
for instance, a 51-year-old former analyst at Bear Stearns. Learning
that he would be laid off after JPMorgan Chase took over his failed
employer, he "threw himself out of the window" of his 29th-floor
apartment in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Or consider the 52-year-old commercial real estate broker from suburban Chicago who "took his life
in a wildlife preserve" just "a month after he publicly worried over a
challenging market," or the 50-year-old "managing partner at Leeward
Investments" from San Carlos, California, who got wiped out "in the
markets" and "suffocated himself to death."

Beverly Hills clinical psychologist Leslie Seppinni caught something of our moment when she told Forbes magazine
that this was "the first time in her 18-year career that businessmen
are calling her with suicidal impulses over their financial state." In
the last three months, alone, "she has intervened in at least 14 cases
of men seriously considering taking their lives." Seppinni offered this
observation: "They feel guilt and shame because they think they should
have known what was coming with the market or they should have pulled
out faster."

Still, it's mostly on Main Street, not Wall Street, that people are
being driven to once unthinkable extremes. And while it's always
impossible to know the myriad factors, including deeply personal ones,
that contribute to drastic acts, violent or otherwise, many of those
recently reported are undoubtedly tied, at least in part, to the way
the bottom seems to be falling out of the economy.

As a result, reports of people driven to anything from armed robbery to
financially-motivated suicide in response to new fiscal realities
continue to bubble to the surface. And since only a certain percentage
of such acts receive media coverage, the drumbeat of what is being reported definitely qualifies as startling.

Breaking the Bank

In September 2008, a 23-year-old woman from West Norriton, Pennsylvania, robbed a bank,
police reported, to pay her rent. According to East Norriton Detective
Sgt. Peter Mastrocola, "She said that the reason that she went to PNC
Bank and committed the robbery was because she was two months behind in
her rent and she was going to be evicted." In fact, after stealing
$1,410, the young woman reportedly told police that she "took the cash
from the robbery and went to another bank where she purchased a
cashier's check for $1,410 made payable to Westover Village
Apartments..."

The next month, in Northampton, Pennsylvania, a 49-year-old woman
reportedly robbed a bank and, just 18 minutes later, "arrived at a
check-cashing business and arranged for several money orders --
totaling $1,090 -- to pay a portion of the rent she owed her landlord."
According to court papers, a "confidential informant" told police the
woman had confided that "she was going to rob the bank to satisfy about
$1,800 in back rent." The police reported that she was "in the process
of being evicted."

This, however, is no Keystone State phenomenon. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported,
"Another sign of the bad economic times... [b]ank robberies, which had
been declining for years, rose in 2008 in Southern California... [by] 22%
compared to 2007." In Orange County, the spike was especially acute, a
jump of 41% to 145 robberies. Similarly, Inland Empire News Radio reported that authorities attributed a 13% rise in bank robberies in Riverside and San Bernardino counties to a "poor economy."

"We've certainly seen a rise in bank robberies across the country
particularly in our metropolitan areas," FBI Special Agent Scott Wilson
recently pointed out. "The bank robbery rate has risen dramatically."

Last year, according to the New York City Police Department, bank
robberies in that city jumped to more than 430, a 54% rise over 2007.
On December 29th alone, CNN noted,
"robbers targeted five banks in the Big Apple, some striking in broad
daylight and near famous landmarks." Interviewed by the New York Times,
a customer in one of the robbed banks put the obvious into words: "It
makes me think that the recession is making people go to extreme
measures." Illinois Wesleyan University Economics Professor Mike
Seeborg agrees. Commenting on a similar local spike in crime, he told
a Central Illinois TV station, "There's a clear linkage nationwide that
when the economy is in bad shape, when unemployment begins to increase,
if people lose their jobs and output falls, that crimes against
property especially increase."

Suicidal Tendencies

At least 33 people chose to commit suicide in national parks in 2008.
And there seemed to be an economic component to at least some of the
cases. For example, an Associated Press report
noted that a "49-year-old builder blamed the economy in a note he left
for his ex-wife and attorney before killing himself at the edge of the
woods at Georgia's Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park."
Similarly, in October, Bruce J. Colburn, a "[f]reshly unemployed,
former business executive" from Reading, Pennsylvania, traveled to
Montana's scenic Glacier National Park where "he shot himself in the
chest with a handgun, according to park officials."

Others stayed closer to home.

On October 14, 2008, a woman in Bogart, Georgia, was "supposed to go to court for an eviction hearing." Instead, she called the police
and informed them that she was thinking of killing herself. Not long
afterward, she shot herself in the head. On October 29th, a 47-year-old
man from Blount County, Tennessee, "killed himself when sheriff's deputies tried to evict him from his rented home." The next month, according to Mike Witzky,
the executive director of the Mental Health and Recovery Board in Union
County, Ohio, two local men committed suicide due to financial
problems, while another failed in his attempt.

On December 5, 2008, Ricky Guseman of West Palm Beach, Florida, was to be evicted. Instead, local officials told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, he "barricaded himself in a mobile home... set the place on fire and then shot himself in the head with a shotgun."

In December, coroner's investigators in Kern County, California, revealed that they were "seeing a wave of people committing suicide because of financial stress," a 5-10% increase over 2007.

An analysis
of 2008 "death reports" in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, by local ABC
television affiliate WISN-TV found "[f]inancial pressure in a difficult
economy has led to desperate measures." Of 108 suicides -- a 20% jump
over any of the last three years -- at least 25% of the victims "were
struggling financially." For example, Wauwatosa resident Tom Brisch, a
married father of two, fell on hard times after his wife of 20 years,
Sherry, lost her job. At the same time, his job as a commission-only
Ford car salesman fell victim to the sluggish auto market. As Sherry
summed the situation up after his suicide, "[T]he economic picture with
a kid going to college, another one starting high school... was pretty
grim and we were struggling." She returned home one day to find that
her husband had hanged himself. In his shirt pocket was a suicide note
in which "he asked for forgiveness and wrote that he could not get it
together to provide for them."

WISN-TV uncovered a host of similar tragedies including:

* A 21-year-old Milwaukee man who shot himself in the face after "he ran out of unemployment [insurance]."

* A 43-year-old West Allis man who hanged himself in his basement
with a belt. "[T]he mortgage payments are behind," his girlfriend told
the police. "There are astronomical medical bills."

* A 40-year-old Milwaukee woman who overdosed after having "financial problems."

* A 24-year-old Milwaukee man, "fired from his job three weeks before," who suffocated himself with Saran Wrap.

* And a 38-year-old Milwaukee man who shot himself in the head. He'd lost his job six weeks earlier.

In January, less than an hour's drive south of Milwaukee, 37-year-old
Staci Paul's car was pulled from Lake Michigan, but they couldn't find
the body of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, woman. As an article
in the Kenosha News noted, however, friends "said they knew things
hadn't been easy for Paul. A single mother, she worked hard to find
jobs and as the economy worsened, friends speculated, Paul might have
run into some financial trouble. Court records also show Paul had been
evicted from her home in October."

Distress Signals

Paul apparently felt she had to deal with her problems on her own.
Others, however, have called for help. According to a January 9th
report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
local police received a phone call concerning a 64-year-old resident of
Westview, Pennsylvania, who was "apparently distraught over losing his
house." When they arrived at the home, they found him "sitting in a
lawn chair in his driveway with a rifle under his chin." He was later
taken into custody and sent to a psychiatric clinic for "evaluation."

Increasing numbers of desperate souls have also called the National
Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which logged a record 568,437 calls in
2008. (There were only 412,768 such calls the previous year.) Similarly, a recent investigation by USA Today's
Marilyn Elias found that suicide hotlines in Dallas, Pittsburgh,
suburban San Francisco, Hyattsville (Maryland), Georgia, Delaware, and
Detroit have all reported "increases in callers since the economy
slid." The report added:

"In Boston, more hotline callers with mental health
problems mention job losses, evictions or fear that they'll lose their
homes, says Roberta Hurtig, executive director at Samaritans Inc. [a
not-for-profit volunteer organization dedicated to reducing the
incidence of suicide.] In Kalamazoo, Mich[igan], and other locales,
callers with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder say loss of
insurance and cutbacks in public health programs are preventing them
from getting medications.

"At the Gary, Ind[iana], Crisis Center, suicidal callers with economic
worries are increasing, and their depression is more severe, says
Willie Perry, program coordinator for the hotline."

In Franklin County, Ohio, suicide hot line volunteers are "logging more
calls from people in financial distress, says Mary Brennen-Hofmann,
coordinator of suicide-prevention services at North Central Mental
Health Services in Columbus." She continued, "We have seen a lot more
calls dealing with financial problems, evictions, foreclosures and job
loss."

Similarly, the Hopeline of North Carolina Inc. in Raleigh saw a 50%
jump in calls in October and November. "We get calls from people who
are suicidal because the stock market is down," said executive director Courtney Atwood. "They have lost money and are not able to provide for their family."

In Los Angeles, calls to the city's "busiest suicide hot line"
increased by as much as 60% last year. "A year ago, many of the calls
we would get were from people with mental illnesses," commented Sandri Kramer,
the program director of the center that operates the hot line. "Now
many of the calls are from people who have lost their home, or their
job, or who still have a job but can't meet the cost of living."

Domestic Disturbances

Not surprisingly, the economic meltdown has also strained marriages
and, according to experts, is contributing to a rise in domestic
violence. Retha Fielding, a spokeswoman for the National Domestic
Violence Hotline, notes that calls increased 18% between October 2007
and October 2008 and attributes the spike to the poor economy. "It is
bringing increased stress and violence into the home. Domestic violence
is about control. If you lose your job, that's control you don't have,
so you may want to have more control at home."

Sometimes economically exacerbated violence can turn deadly.

On December 9th, for example, 59-year-old Thomas Garrett of Midwest City, Oklahoma, murdered his wife. According to Midwest City Police Chief
Brandon Clabes, "Garrett told officers he shot his wife because he
didn't know how to explain that they were evicted from their home while
she was in the hospital." He apparently planned to kill himself too,
but was stopped by the police.

Thirty-one-year-old Eryn Allegra had lost her home as well as her
job, and had, according to press accounts, been thinking about suicide
for weeks. On Christmas day, the Port St. Lucie, Florida, resident
reportedly checked into a hotel, gave her 8-year-old son over-the-counter medicine to put him to sleep, and then smothered him. She subsequently slit her own wrists in a failed suicide attempt.

Noting a man's pickup truck parked in his driveway at a time when he
was normally at work, neighbors in an "upscale neighborhood" in
Manteca, Georgia, entered his home which a bank had recently approved
for a short sale. (A short sale often takes place when a buyer in
default is trying to avoid foreclosure.) According to the Manteca Bulletin,
they found him "lying in the foyer of the home... dead of a gunshot
wound." Arriving at the scene soon after, police discovered the body of
his wife nearby "and located a firearm near the two bodies."

On January 11th, Pinole, California police responding to a domestic disturbance call found
43-year-old Kimberly Petretti sitting on the curb in front of the home.
She was being evicted that morning. Inside the house, which "showed no
signs of a preparation for the move," they found the woman's mother,
62-year-old Claudia Petretti, dead -- shot in the head with an assault
rifle. According to Deputy District Attorney Harold Jewett, a two-page
letter on the scene indicated a murder-suicide plan linked to the
family's financial difficulties. "It was a significant event in their
lives that may have precipitated this tragic and desperate act," he said.

Last October, a man in Los Angeles, beset by financial troubles, shot
his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons before turning the gun on
himself. An eerily similar scene replayed itself this week, when
another Los Angeles resident apparently killed his wife and five
children -- an 8-year-old girl, twin 5-year-old girls, and twin
2-year-old boys -- before faxing a letter to a local television station
and then killing himself. "This was a financial and job-related issue
that led to the slayings," Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner
https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/4-children-moth.htmlsaid.
"In these tough economic times, there are other options. In my 32
years, I've never seen anything like this."

As the World Burns

On December 15th,
a 41-year-old Dubuque, Iowa man "used liquid pre-shave to set his
apartment on fire because he thought he was going to be evicted."

On December 21st, a 31-year-old woman who had been evicted
from her Orange Park, Florida, apartment, "started a weekend fire that
caused an estimated $500,000 in damage" to the complex that was her
former home. That same day, a woman in St. Augustine, Florida, "was charged with arson... after vacating a house she was evicted from that was later found burning."

On January 5, 2009, Bobby Crigler, the property manager for Holly
Street Apartments in Fayetteville, Arkansas, said, "I went over and had
a confrontation with [tenants about an eviction notice], and they got
belligerent." After that, he sent the property's maintenance man, his
son, 49-year-old Kent Crigler, to change the locks at another tenant's
apartment. When friends of the tenant facing eviction spotted Kent,
they assumed, according to Bobby, that he was there to evict their
buddy. They set upon Kent, punching and kicking the father of four to
death, according to a report in the Northwest Arkansas Times.

Generally, however, if you weren't a multimillionaire intent on
suicide, what you did to your house, your husband, your wife, your
child, your bank, your neighbors, your landlord, or yourself remained a
distinctly local story, a passing moment in the neighborhood gazette or
a regional paper. And for the range of such acts, unlike sports
statistics, there are no centralized databases toting up and keeping
score. Every now and then, though, a spectacular act of extreme
desperation makes it out of the neighborhood and into the national
news.

One of these occurred this January, although the media generally played
it as a sensational screwball story rather than another extreme act
stemming from the economic crisis. In December, Marcus Schrenker, a
money manager and sometime stunt pilot, penned a letter that read, in
part: "It needs to be known that I am financially insolvent... I am
intending on filing bankruptcy in 2009 should my financial conditions
continue to deteriorate." They did.

As the Indiana investment adviser grew more desperate to escape
mounting financial difficulties and legal issues stemming from
accusations of investor fraud, he reportedly hatched a plan that was
splashed all over national television as it unfolded. According to news reports,
he staged a Hollywood-style getaway from his rapidly deteriorating
life, complete with a fake mid-air mayday call, a parachute jump over
Alabama, and a faked death from a plane he put on autopilot that
crashed in a swamp near a residential area in the Florida Panhandle.
Schrenker then raced away on a carefully pre-stashed motorcycle, before
being discovered by federal marshals just after he had slashed his
wrists at a Florida campsite. He recently pleaded not guilty in federal
court to charges that he willfully destroyed an aircraft and made a
fake distress call.

Going to Extremes

Across the United States, people have been reacting to dire
circumstances with extreme acts, including murder, suicide and suicide
attempts, self-inflicted injury, bank robberies, flights from the law,
and arson, as well as resistance to eviction and armed self-defense.
And yet, while various bailout schemes
have been introduced and implemented for banks and giant corporations,
no significant plans have been outlined or introduced into public
debate, let alone implemented by Washington, to take strong measures to
combat the dire circumstances affecting ordinary Americans.

There has been next to no talk of debt or mortgage forgiveness, or of
an enhanced and massively bulked-up version of the Nixonian guaranteed income plan
(which would pay stipends to the neediest), or of buying up and handing
over the glut of homes on the market, with adequate fix-up funds, to
the homeless, or of any significant gesture toward even the most modest
redistributions of wealth. Until then, for many, hope will be nothing
but a slogan, the body count will rise, and Americans will undoubtedly
continue going to extremes.