AIDS Haunts Man to His Death : Disease: Ronald Berst was a bright, athletic engineer who could not bear to be seen as weakened and dependent. He became the 900th suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge.

For three years Ronald R. Berst tried to make peace with the AIDS virus despoiling his body, but finally he gave in.

On the first day of summer, Berst drove from his West Hollywood home to Los Angeles International Airport, locked his car keys in the glove box and flew to San Francisco. There was a bittersweet Friday night dinner on June 21 with two sisters. On that Sunday, Berst walked part way across the Golden Gate Bridge and stepped over the side.

His was the 900th official suicide from the famous bridge, which lures the desperate and the haunted. Berst’s agonies were the slow but undeniable creep of his disease, and the fear of being remembered only as the tortured, dependent man he expected to become if the sickness took its course.

“He just didn’t want to be a burden,” said Jeffrey Blair, Berst’s roommate for the last year.

Berst wanted to be remembered as a bright, party-loving engineer who water-skied in the ocean off Southern California, and who thought parachuting out of airplanes was a fun way to spend a weekend.

“I just couldn’t get it through his head that people were always going to see him that way,” Blair said.

Berst, 38, had left home in Seattle at 16 and without formal education had risen to become a telecommunication systems engineer for NEC Corp. in Culver City. He liked to take Blair around the city and point out places, such as Paramount Studios, where his handiwork was installed.

The suicide was a surprise to Berst’s family, but less so to his roommate and best friend. Blair said that Berst had learned of his infection with the human immunodeficiency virus about two years ago, and when the symptoms began to intensify last year, had talked of taking his life.

Berst loved to travel, “and every time he would go out of town I would worry,” Blair said.

This time, the virus had begun to do odd things with Berst’s mind, but he was still working. The trip to San Francisco seemed routine. Berst was going there for the weekend and would be back Monday. When he did not return, “I suspected the worst,” Blair said.

Blair contacted Berst’s sister, Carla, who by then had the same fears. Berst had come into town unannounced, but enjoyed the dinner hastily arranged in Los Gatos with another sister and hometown friends from Seattle. There were reminiscences of childhood, and tears for another friend in a losing fight with AIDS.

Carla Berst and her brother were to meet the next night, Saturday, but he canceled and promised to call Sunday. When the call never came, Carla Berst left messages at Berst’s motel. That Monday--a week ago--she prevailed on the manager to inspect the room, where they discovered several notes, some carefully composed on a computer, some scrawled on motel stationery.

“I want to be remembered as a fairly active, vibrant, caring individual,” read one note, which Carla Berst provided to San Francisco Examiner columnist Rob Morse.

They also found a white jacket with smears of orange paint, possibly from the Golden Gate Bridge. In a Morse column that ran June 28, Carla Berst said she thinks her brother went to the bridge on Saturday night but could not bring himself to jump. About 11 a.m. on Sunday, witnesses saw a man in blue jeans and white shirt leap from the bridge.

“He didn’t have many physical symptoms,” Carla Berst, who identified the body, told Morse, “but this was a brilliant man who made a living with his mind. He felt his mind going and couldn’t stand it.”

Ruliena Berst, an aunt in Los Angeles, said the family was aware that Berst had the disease.

“It was too much for him to deal with this, and he didn’t want to become a burden to anyone,” she said Monday.

The family has scheduled a memorial service for Monday at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Chapel.