French police are investigating the suicide of two teenage girls who tied themselves together and leapt from the 17th storey of a tower block while their horrified boyfriends watched.
The girls, named only as Marion and Virginie, had apparently carefully prepared their deaths and had intended their boyfriends, Ben and Julien, to witness the event. The two friends had gone to a relative’s flat and told the two boys to wait in the living room while they prepared a ”surprise”.
One of them called out from the bedroom: ”OK, come in.” Ben opened the door. Marion and Virginie were standing on the window sill, their hands tied together. They smiled. And jumped.
As a shocked France learned the details, which were splashed over every national daily paper on Monday, a small mountain of flowers and torn-out exercise-book pages, each bearing a tearful message or poem in a round, childish hand, continued to grow at the foot of Block A of the Cité Monmousseau in the southern Paris suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine. It still could not quite cover the sawdust and the patch of bloodstained ground beneath.
A stream of Marion’s and Virginie’s friends from the College Romain-Rolland came by. They left bouquets, notes, chains, pendants and a ring.
”They were quite gothic, but nothing really weird,” said Melodie (13), dabbing her eyes. ”I wasn’t in their class, but I knew them. People must have been very, very horrible to them if this was the only way out. Have you seen how high it is?”
Gregory (14) took off his baseball cap and twisted it hard in his hands as he glared at the tributes.
”No one can know what they must have gone through,” he said. ”But that’s what’s so awful — apparently no one did know what they were going through. They were really close friends, like inseparable. And they always seemed happy enough.”
Virginie had started at the school only this month, said Manon (14).
”On the first day of term, she hitched on to Marion,” she said. ”They dressed the same, always black, lots of make-up, and they liked the same music, Marilyn Manson, goth rock, metal … Marion said once Virginie was the only person who understood her.”
The suicide bears strong similarities to that of two adolescent girls who jumped to their deaths from the cliffs of Cap Blanc Nez last January.
One, Clémence, had warned in her blog that she wanted ”to go. I want to die.”
According to Xavier Pommereau, a psychiatrist who runs a home for teenagers with suicidal tendencies, suicide pacts ”almost invariably involve girls aged between 14 and 16 … [who] feel a deep-seated need to find their ‘narcissistic double’, a soul partner with whom they can share absolutely everything”.
French government statistics show 40 000 teenagers report suicidal feelings each year, and about 800 take their lives; suicide is the second-most-common cause of death in this age group after road accidents. Girls are almost three times as likely as boys to attempt suicide, and more than three times as likely to try again if their first attempt is unsuccessful.
Neither Marion nor Virginie, however, seems to have been causing concern to their families, or to the police or social services in Vitry, the neighbouring town where they lived. Interviewed by a police officer and teachers last Thursday, after they had truanted together the previous day, neither said or did anything to cause alarm.
”They were perfectly normal, very mature even,” a police spokesperson said. ”A bit morbid, apparently, a fascination with death; but nothing beyond what lots of kids go in for.”
One classmate, who asked not to be named, had been worried.
”Virginie was always saying she had had enough, that her life was shit, she was going to commit suicide, maybe with Marion.”
And the mother of Ben, one of the witnesses of the incident and whom friends describe as Marion’s oldest friend, told French media that he had been ”very worried since last week, when the girls took the day off school. He didn’t want to leave her alone. He said to me he thought she was going to do something stupid.”
The handwritten note found in her pocket said: ”Life is not worth living.”
But as the anguished Communist mayor of Ivry, Pierre Gosnat, asked at an impromptu memorial gathering on Sunday evening: ”In the end, little girls of 14 years of age, what did you know of life?” — Guardian Unlimited Â