2 High School Girls Die in Apparent Suicide Pact : Violence: The Victorville teen-agers left notes indicating that they were ‘tired of life.’ Each was shot in the head, authorities say.

Two 14-year-old girls, each carrying a handgun, walked into the desert behind a housing tract in Victorville and executed a double-suicide pact that stunned their parents and friends, authorities said Wednesday.

One victim gave a classmate a suicide note during school Tuesday with the admonition that it not be opened until the end of classes. By the time the girl read the note and became frantic, the teen-agers were dead, officials said.

The girls’ bodies, dressed in jeans and T-shirts and almost touching each other, were found by children walking through the area Tuesday afternoon, San Bernardino County Deputy Coroner Linda Myers said. Each was shot in the head and the weapons were at their sides.

The handguns had been taken from one of the girls’ homes, Myers said.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s investigators later found another suicide note at one of the victims’ homes. Both notes were signed by both girls and indicated that they “were tired of life” but did not elaborate, department spokesman Dave Smedley said.

The girls, whose identities were withheld at the request of their families, met two years ago in junior high school and were honor roll freshmen at Victor Valley High School, a 3,600-student campus that serves the High Desert communities of Victorville and Adelanto.

Assistant Supt. Ron Powell said the girls “had talked with a close cadre of friends about the possibility of suicide, but they weren’t taken seriously.”

Counselors spent much of Wednesday attempting to assuage the guilt of classmates who believed that they should have intervened and could have prevented the tragedy, Powell said.

“We are very concerned about the possibility of copycat suicides,” Powell said. “Statistics indicate we’re more at risk of additional suicides when there are multiple suicides.”

The father and uncle of one of the victims met with about 25 of the girls’ closest friends at school Wednesday morning to directly address that concern, Powell said.

“The father issued a plea to them not to let his daughter’s death be in vain, and please, that no one repeat this,” Powell said. “He said, essentially, ‘Let’s not have any more tragedy emanate from the loss of my daughter.’ ”

The classmates entered the group counseling session “very depressed, a pall cast about them,” Powell said. “But as a result of the dad being very upfront with them, very revealing and talking so forthrightly, they left feeling much better about the situation and in dealing with their own feelings of ambivalence and guilt.”

One of the girls was a straight-A student in eighth grade, participated in the junior high student leadership team and played basketball, Powell said.

The girl’s father told students that she had enjoyed a normal weekend with the family, including a shopping outing with her mother, and that “things were fine” at home.

But school administrators “indicated that she was having difficulties generally in her life, both at school and at home--relationship issues,” Powell said.

Officials later found a book in the girl’s locker, marked at a “particularly dark passage that had to do with death,” Powell said.

The other student--whose father visited the campus Wednesday--was involved in the school’s ROTC program and would have turned 15 Friday. She was the student who passed the suicide note to a classmate before classes ended Tuesday.

Powell said there was no known catalyst leading to the suicides, and that there was no indication that either girl was involved in drugs.