Family, Friends Grapple With Teenagers’ Suicides

In two homes, two schools, two communities, grief in all its manifestations came to call Monday as those who knew the South Bay victims of an apparent teenage suicide pact struggled with the inevitable: “Why?”

In tony Rancho Palos Verdes, where 15-year-old Heidi K. Chamberlain attended one of the nation’s finest public schools, her stricken parents numbly made funeral plans, and her girlfriends huddled, red-eyed, in the school halls.

Down the coast in working-class San Pedro, where Chamberlain’s 16-year-old surfer boyfriend, Christopher Mills, had transferred last fall from a nearby parochial school to the public high school, baffled teachers and relatives could talk only about how nice he seemed--A’s and Bs on report cards, a college prep course load, a job as a part-time gas jockey.

“He seemed like a well-adjusted kid,” said his grandfather, Jim Kenny, 64, of Riverside. “Just got his first job. Just got his first paycheck. I don’t think his parents had any idea.”

But as any adolescent can tell you, the parents are sometimes the last to know the inner workings of lost young souls. And on the barricaded cliff from which the two children leaped to their deaths early Sunday, their young friends said that, in hindsight, it was clear that the couple’s world had a troubled underside.

Their Heidi, they said, was a highly strung girl who tended to dramatize her life--so much so that, when she told them that she and her mom were fighting over her new boyfriend, they didn’t take her seriously.

And their Chris, they said, was a complicated kid, a guitarist in a punk garage band who, behind his jocular facade, battled bouts of deep depression. In creative writing class, his project was on suicide, one classmate said. Another recalled how he had wept at the self-inflicted death of the angst-ridden grunge singer Kurt Cobain. In fact, one source who had read the boy’s suicide note said that in it, he quoted the ill-fated Cobain, saying, “You can’t fire me. I quit”--a line from the song “Scentless Apprentice” on Nirvana’s “In Utero” album. Such expressions seemed salient to the more than 70 young people who gathered Sunday with church elders to try to sort out the trauma of the couple’s deaths.

“He was kind of death-happy,” said Jeff Stratford, 16, who was a friend of Heidi’s and who had met Chris through her. “Not sad, but more like, ‘The other side is gonna be so much more fun.’ More like, ‘I can’t wait to die.’ ”

Other friends also alluded to their confusion as they came Monday to pay homage with votive candles and spring bouquets at the wind-swept ledge with the ocean view. One had hung a poem, written in purple ink and titled “An Angel’s Plunge,” on the fence barring the public from the cliff’s edge.

“We stole those flowers,” said a black-clad youth with long, center-parted bangs, hiking back from the precipice from which he had hurled handfuls of blossoms onto the jagged rocks.

“It’s what [Chris] would have wanted us to do.”

Sheriff’s homicide investigators said Heidi and Chris seemingly had planned their suicide, which apparently occurred in darkness sometime in the early hours Sunday. The two had to hike about 100 feet down a rugged path and duck through a hole in a chain-link fence to get to the narrow concrete spillway--locally known as “the diving board”--from which they jumped 150 feet to the roiling surf below.

On the narrow ledge, the pair left a blue cigarette lighter, a cigarette pack and cigarette butts arranged in an arrow pointing to the end from which they had jumped. Their bodies were found after sunup Sunday by a jogger. Both left suicide notes--she in her suburban home, he in the car they drove to their lovers’ leap.

Heidi’s mother, Donna Chamberlain, said her daughter--a horse-loving, soccer-playing sophomore at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School--had been dating Chris since December, when some mutual friends brought him to a dance at her church. Religion, the mother said, had in recent months become increasingly important in Heidi’s life; she was baptized into the Lunada Bay Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about the same time that she met Chris.

Chris had been raised Catholic; until this year, friends said, he had been enrolled at St. John Bosco High School, a Bellflower parochial school. At San Pedro High School, however, he quickly made friends. Classmates there described him as a cutup and avid surfer who, despite his carefree style, still managed to maintain above-average grades.

“People kept saying to me, ‘Sorry to hear about Chris,’ ” said Harvey Contreras, 18. “I didn’t believe it was the Chris I knew. . . . He was a really outgoing person. If any of us were down, he would do what he could to bring us up.”

Contreras said he had talked to his friend after school Friday and saw no sign that he might be thinking of killing himself.

“He was really happy. He was going to help out this weekend on producing the student fashion show. He’s the last person you’d expect to do this,” Contreras said.

But 16-year-old Mike Yasa, who played in a garage band called Crump’s Brother with Chris, saw glimpses of a different boy. A friend since childhood, Yasa said he could always tell when Chris’ dark side was holding sway by the makeup that he would periodically smear across his eyes.

“He talked about how he would get depressed, but I never thought he would go this far,” Yasa said. He said he did not know precisely what brought his friend down because he had never asked.

Heidi too was described by those who knew her as a passionate and lively person--especially when it came to Chris. Though they had dated only a short time, friends said, she was smitten and talked often about how good-looking he was.

Though the girl’s friends said her parents argued with Heidi about the boy, the mother said she and her husband didn’t take the relationship especially seriously. As it evolved, however, they did initiate a rule--to Heidi’s dismay--forbidding her to entertain Chris at their home without a parent there to chaperon. Heidi, she said, argued but didn’t seem overwhelmingly upset.

But for reasons about which neither the family nor the authorities would elaborate, Heidi was grounded Friday, investigators said. Flouting orders not to leave the house, she apparently took the keys to her parents’ white Plymouth Horizon, sneaked out of the house and drove to her boyfriend’s San Pedro home.

Chris’ relatives said she seemed distraught when she arrived at the house about 12:30 a.m. Chris, they added, said he was going to console her and left.

“He said he’d be right back,” his brother Ryan Mills told Associated Press. “He even left the light on in his room.”

It wasn’t until the following dawn that the young girl’s mother peeked into her daughter’s room, as always, and found that her child was neither in her bed nor on the couch. When she realized that the car was gone, she said, she called Chris’ house and was told that his bed was empty, too. Then, she said, she found the note--a one-page affair, scribbled on a sheet of white notebook paper, in Heidi’s room.

“I couldn’t get through the whole note because it was so final, and it scared me,” the mother said, weeping. “She just said that she wanted to be free and to fly.”

At the bottom, after some words about going to a better place, the daughter wrote, “I love you mom. I’ll watch you from above.”

On Monday afternoon, Donna Chamberlain said she could only speculate about what happened--two kids egging each other on, neither one wanting to back out--until it was too late.

“I guess it is a case of the wrong two people getting together at the wrong time,” she said. “If there was any clue, I didn’t get it.”

And yet, she said, the tragedy is that this need not have happened.

“There’s nothing you can’t tell your parents,” the distraught woman said before closing the door. “There’s no problem they cannot solve. And this wasn’t an answer to the problem.”

Times staff writers Shawn Hubler and Emi Endo and correspondents Laura Accinelli and Deborah Belgum contributed to this story.