BY MALLIKA RAO
No one understood why a Santa Monica
High School student killed himself
one afternoon in early 2011, leaping from the roof of a
10-story hotel as his teammates from the school baseball
team watched in horror from a field across the street. He
wasn’t “the kind of person you would expect to have these
feelings,” the boy’s rabbi told the Los Angeles Times.
“Something went horribly, horribly wrong.” ¶ City officials fixated on that something. Where in the 14-yearold-boy matrix of hormones, classes, family and friends
had the seeds of such sadness been planted?