PV Seniors and friends of Jack Farrell got together to promote suicide awareness.
Handling a Tragedy
The Smoke Signal’s dilemma on how to address the suicide of a student
November was tough.
The effects of one autumn day tore through the Pasca- ck Valley community like a tornado: unforgiving and un- relenting, leaving a mark on every student, every faculty member, and every parent in the district. The world seemed to pause for a week, as grief clouded the somber halls of PV, so eerily silent that it was almost as if no one was there.
And no one quite knew just how to handle it.
From a personal standpoint, 17-year-old classmate Jack Farrell’s suicide was a tragedy—a loss of a friend who had a sense of humor like no other and a network of friends so tightly woven that it seemed as if nothing could slip through. The initial reactions from myself and the majority of other students in the school were ones of shock, disbelief, and longing to know just exactly what could have led him to such an act.
Yet, from an administrative standpoint, the event sparked a moral conundrum that would go on to dominate every conversation in its immediate aftermath. How does a school address the topic of suicide, so drastically different than death from illnesses or accidents? What actions would the school administration take to both heal a broken community and prevent similar acts from taking place in the future?
The administration’s stance was firm from the very beginning: there would be no memorialization. The school feared the oft-discussed “suicide clusters” which tend to develop in areas recently struck by suicide. Initial memorial efforts were shot down and the candlelit vigil on PV’s field was banned, forcing organizers to relocate the event to the field near the River Vale Library—a move that was still highly discouraged.
Instead, the administration called for students to join the fight against teen suicide in place of memorial efforts that they feared would glorify the act. Suicide prevention bracelets began to circulate among the student body, dozens of students posted pictures of themselves on social media with a poster saying “You are not Alone #saveteens,” and Farrell’s lacrosse team made special turquoise and purple uniforms for suicide prevention to wear on their senior night, among other efforts.
Pictured above (from left): Mark Herdling, Jacob Steinberg, Evan Karcz, Jack Williams, Luke Ciocca, James Nugent, Lucas Ochoa, Tommy Uhl, Andrew Merli, Conor Kimball, Chris DeCotiis, Philip Wong, Jake Schroeder, Sean Tocci, Alexander Gruppuso, and Hugh Cassidy. The Pascack Valley Boys Lacrosse team for which Farrell used to play dedicated their senior night to suicide prevention and awareness. The team made custom uniforms in purple and turquoise, the colors for suicide prevention, for the occasion.
However, as a school newspaper, The Smoke Signal has a different role than the school administration. It is a newspaper’s responsibility—its moral obligation—to report on the major events in a school community, regardless of the circumstances. If there is a pertinent issue or development happening within Pascack Valley, The Smoke Signal should be the first organization to know about and cover such an event. After all, this was the goal when we switched our base of operations from paper to an online vehicle just three years ago.
But we didn’t. Not this time. The Jack Farrell situation was unprecedented territory for even the most tested of newspapers. In the past we had weathered a white supremacy firestorm, we had covered all angles of PV’s controversial transgender policy with no hiccups, and we even had sparked a Colin Kaepernick-style debate over students not standing up for the Pledge of the Allegiance. But never had we faced such a task so delicate as finding the correct way to address the suicide of one of Pascack Valley’s own students.
And I’m not entirely sure we did the event justice. The news broke throughout the course of that dreary Sunday and began to spread like wildfire. Initially, we contemplated with the idea of publishing a press-release type of story on that night, simply listing the known information briefly to acknowledge what had happened. However, at that point, most people in the PV community already knew the information by either word of mouth, a letter sent out by Principal Tom DeMaio, or a similar press-release story from The Pascack Valley Daily Voice.
So, for that night, there would be no mention on The Smoke Signal of Jack Farrell.
The following days brought even more uncertainty. The administration wasted no time in making its rounds and enforcing its anti-memorial policies. This included a visit from principal Tom DeMaio to The Smoke Signal’s editing staff during one of our weekly meetings, informing us of the administration’s concerns. While not technically commanded, it was highly recommended that we avoid publishing stories directly regarding Farrell. We were advised instead to publish a story regarding teen suicide, if anything at all.
This created a conflict in the journalistic minds of our editing staff. We wanted to tell the full and true story, but did not want to risk opposing then word of our administration and straining a relationship we value highly. It was a difficult decision, either way. Ultimately, we chose to bite our tongues and listen to the administration’s instructions, going against our desire to address the situation more directly.
The whole school week went by without anything related to the suicide being published on The Smoke Signal. It was a strange feeling to know what was happening in the PV community, but only see the website showcasing stories about our hockey team and the Valley Cup. There was a noticeable discomfort among the members of our editing staff; it felt like we were ignoring and trying to push aside a major issue for the sake of not wanting to cause controversy.
We eventually decided the silence could not continue, and settled on putting together one story regarding what the school administration was doing in wake of the tragedy. We immediately put our most trusted and quickest writer, Jamie Ryu, on the case. By the following Monday, a full week after the event occurred, “Administration aims to maintain normalcy in wake of recent tragedy” was published.
The story focused on why the administration chose to not address the issue on a larger scale, and the psychological reasons and advantages behind that decision. The story was decent in its own right, but it felt like it was missing the appropriate context needed for a situation of this magnitude. Jack Farrell’s story never was told.
Later in the year, the idea to tell the full story resurfaced among the members of our editing staff. Enough time had passed that this was not an entirely raw topic in the school, but it was still relevant to the wounded community. The idea to delve into Farrell’s life—from the beginning to the end—was tossed around for a long time by our staff.
Whether it was the fear of backlash or the need for meticulous and careful work to be done, the idea never materialized. Ryu’s story was the only thing we ever published on the website about the event.
To this day, I am still not sure what the right course of action would have been. I have many regrets on the way myself and The Smoke Signal as a publication handled the tragedy. If I could go back, I think I would have handled it differently. What that means, however, in terms of what would have been published and what reaction we would have elicited, will forever be unknown.
But, given the circumstances in real time, I think that we got it wrong.