By Michael Copley
Staff Writer

She was a normal kid. She liked watching movies and playing video games, and she loved McDonald’s chicken nuggets. She liked riding on the back of her dad’s motorcycle and going with him to the Moose Lodge on Thursday nights. She played soccer, and when she grew up, she wanted to be a pet detective.

She was a typical teenager- shy sometimes, with a stubborn streak.

Then in May 2009, while her dad made dinner, 14-year-old Mariah Elwell committed suicide in her family’s driveway.

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Each year in this country, about 5,000 teenagers commit suicide.

It’s the third leading cause of death for people age 15 to 24, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology. Between 2002 and 2006, almost 22,000 people between the ages of 10 and 24 killed themselves, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Powhatan, three teenagers have committed suicide in the past 10 years.

It’s a final act that leaves family and friends to deal with a viscous reality; often the thing is too sad and too empty for society to talk about.

Mariah’s story is one of thousands.

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The only light in the living room is from the sun filtering through the trees in the early evening. There are pictures of Mariah everywhere- on the walls and shelves, and in envelopes on the staircase.

Sherry Elwell, Mariah’s mom, measures her words and picks through the memories carefully.

“She loved to make people laugh,” Sherry said. “She’d act silly all the time. She had a face when she was little that she used to make to [get] people to laugh, and that’s one of my favorite pictures of her.”

Every hand life deals is different; no one gets to pick theirs.

Sherry and Kevin Elwell adopted Mariah when she was five years old. Mariah had a sister who wasn’t put up for adoption, and she had sporadic contact with her birth mother until the adoption was finalized.

Mariah was shy- an introvert, really, Sherry said, and she struggled with the feeling that she didn’t fit in. She had a small group of friends, but Sherry said most of the kids at school didn’t understand her daughter.

Mariah got worn down by bullying.

But this isn’t a story that can be reduced to simple cause and effect.

“Keep in mind,” Sherry said, “that sometimes the kids teasing her would [just] be them playing with her, and she would take it that they were being mean.”

“Mariah just had a lot of inner demons.”

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Sherry and Kevin tried to protect Mariah from a society that, “as a whole, wants these kids to grow up too fast,” Kevin said.

They tried to do everything right.

The family ate together. Sherry and Kevin monitored Mariah’s internet use. Kevin coached Mariah’s soccer team, and Sherry was on the schools’ drug and safety committee.

But Mariah was growing up.

In defiance of her parents’ rules about the internet, Mariah joined Myspace; in retrospect, Sherry thinks the social-networking site was a refuge for her daughter, a place where she could shake off her insecurities.

“Because on there, the people didn’t know her,” Sherry said. “They weren’t interacting with her everyday, person to person. You can write whatever you want, and she felt like she fit in; where, in the real world, she didn’t fit in anywhere.”

One day Sherry and Kevin discovered Mariah’s Myspace account, and they were shocked and angered by what they saw.

Their 14-year-old daughter had struck up an online relationship with someone who claimed to be a 15-year-old boy who “asked her to do some things that a 14 year old shouldn’t be doing,” Sherry said. “Once I found that I deleted everything off it, which I shouldn’t have, now looking back. I should have taken it straight to the cops. But you do things out of anger and the moment I guess.”

Having that outlet taken away from her, and knowing the disappointment it caused her parents, made Mariah feel like “it was the end of her world,” Sherry said.

That happened on Saturday. Mariah died on Monday.

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A week before Mariah died, Stuart Slusher, then a junior at Douglas Freeman High School, killed himself on Mother’s Day.

In the wake of that loss, one of Slusher’s friends, Steven Ebert, launched the Hold Hope Initiative, an effort to promote suicide awareness and prevention. He’s seeking a $50,000 grant through the Pepsi Refresh Project that would be used to pay for teachers in Henrico County schools to receive suicide-prevention training and education.

“You wouldn’t have thought he was going through anything,” Ebert said of Slusher. “But I think Stu spent so much time worrying about other people’s problems, and he spent so much time helping others, I think he was afraid to address his own.”

As of July 21, Ebert’s proposal was ranked 116 out of 1,094 submissions. The ranking is based on the number of votes the proposal receives through the Pepsi Refresh Project website. Voting ends July 31.

In Powhatan, suicide-prevention training is provided to school staff “at a minimum of once every three years,” Michele Wilson, the school district’s public information officer, wrote in an email.

According to school Superintendent Dr. Margaret S. Meara, division-wide training that was provided last August “emphasized the importance of openly discussing suicide issues with students.”

Meara also pointed to the Peer Mediation Program, which allows students to voluntarily discuss issues they’re having with students their own age. And the schools are implementing the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program at the kindergarten level through the eighth grade. The program is funded by the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act, part of the No Child Left Behind Act.

“Dealing with potential suicide is an on-going issue,” Meara wrote in an email. “Children are confronted with many pressures these days, including those associated with modern technology. We are constantly on the look out for ways to help children deal with problems which may seem unsolvable to them, before tragedy strikes.”

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Mariah called her mom after school, just like she always did.

Sherry had a headache that day, but otherwise it was a normal conversation.

“Are you mad at me?” Mariah asked her mom.

“No,” Sherry remembers saying, “I just have a terrible headache.”

Sherry remembers the conversation perfectly.

“Okay,” said Mariah, “I love you, bye.”

After that Mariah called her dad. Then she went upstairs and recorded a short video for her parents.

In it she said “She couldn’t stand living with seeing the disappointment in our faces of what she had done,” Sherry said.

Kevin got home, and Mariah turned off the video camera. She walked downstairs and sat down over her homework. Kevin was in the middle of preparing dinner when Mariah asked for the keys to his truck, to get something out that she said she had forgotten.

Kevin has a permit for a concealed weapon, and the gun was locked in his truck.

“He didn’t think, you know? You just don’t think that that was what she was going for,” Sherry said.

“So he gave her the keys and went out there two minutes later and she was already gone.”

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Kevin has to take a little more time when he talks about his daughter; he clears his throat after every few sentences.

“We don’t want to see this happen anymore,” he said. “It’s hard, it really is. I wish this on no parent whatsoever- to lose a young’un - you always expect they’ll bury you, not you burying them.”

He added, “We’re the ones who are here now. We have to help some of these kids. They need everybody’s help.”

About 400 people attended Mariah’s funeral last year- a bitter-sweet tribute to a girl who felt so alone. “And she thought she didn’t fit in, that she wasn’t liked,” Sherry said. “I hope she was there and she saw it.”

Mariah’s bedroom window looks out on the place where she died. The blinds stay drawn now, above a garden her parents planted in her memory.

And it’s the parents who are left behind to stand in the garden and turn over in their minds the last days and weeks and months: What could they have done differently? Should they have seen this coming?

It’s maddening, and it’s futile, but the questions will always be there.

Bill Lohmann contributed to this report