Maybe the sun is shining. Maybe the boy is taking long, purposeful strides, his big feet making dents in the soft dirt. He is tall and lanky, and he is tromping through the woods in back of his family's house in Bountiful, and in one hand he is carrying the shotgun his parents bought him when he was 16. Maybe it is dark and he is stumbling, tiptoeing through the underbrush so he doesn't make too much noise.

No one sees Dayne Harris walking toward the playhouse at the top of the wooded lot. His family does not find him until the next day, and when they do there is no note. Later they discover, in the tape player of the Trooper, a copy of Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence," but they don't know if this is significant or not. When they find him he is still wearing his pager, which has dutifully recorded the phone number of a friend.Nothing -- the message, the song, the days leading up to his death -- explains why he decided to kill himself or why he chose this particular day. His parents and his brother and sisters and friends and teachers rehash all of it, again and again, and still wonder how they could have stopped him.

In 1997, the year Dayne Harris died, 57 Utahns between the ages of 10 and 21 committed suicide. More than one a week, 50 of them boys. At Dayne's high school -- Viewmont in Bountiful -- two boys killed themselves that year, out of a senior class of 636.

For some reason that is not clear, Utah boys and young men are killing themselves at rates higher than in nearly every other state in the nation. Suicide has become so common that it sometimes results in the kind of grim coincidence that occurred recently in Salt Lake City. In October, at Highland High, 17-year-old Conrad Jensen died after apparently jumping from a freeway overpass onto I-80. One of the first people summoned to the scene was Highland vice principal Gene Bonella -- whose own 24-year-old son had committed suicide just a month before.

The statistics are alarming: In 1995, for boys ages 15 through 19, Utah's suicide rate (that is, the number of suicides per 100,000 population in that age category) was fourth highest in the nation. In 1996, the latest year for which there are comparative statistics, Utah ranked seventh in the nation.

It was that dubious distinction -- and the fact that Utah's teen suicide rate rose 66percent in one decade (for the five-year period of 1992-96 compared to 1982-86) -- that spurred state health officials to begin investigating why.

"Our initial thought was that we needed a program to prevent (the suicides)," explains Cal Cazier of the Utah Department of Health's Violence and Injury Prevention Program. "But as we started to write the grant, we realized we had numbers but that's all we had. We didn't know what was going on in their minds and lives."

Is there something about Utah in particular, about growing up in Utah, that contributes to the problem? Are there common threads -- depression? drugs? loneliness? -- that could help adults know where and how to intervene? Suicide hotlines often aren't effective, says Cazier.

The Utah Youth Suicide Study was launched in 1996 to conduct "psychological autopsies" of as many young suicide victims as possible. According to Department of Health psychological assistant David Tate, Utah's survey is the nation's most extensive. The three-year project will include interviews with family members, friends, teachers and employers -- 10 or 15 contacts per teenager -- in an effort to cut through to the emotional fascia of each victim's life.

Maybe 50 suicides will make clear what the death of just one boy can't.

Perhaps, through every suicide flow two currents. The deep one that pulls a boy slowly downstream, and the one on the surface, the swift current, that yanks him, finally, over some irrevocable edge.

On the day before his death, while changing lanes in the family's Trooper, Dayne Harris sideswiped another car. His parents were more disappointed than angry, but his mother did point out that his insurance would probably go up.

That night, Dayne got teary, for the first time in years. "Doggone, it Dayne," his mom said, "your life doesn't seem to be going right."

At least that's what Dyan Harris thinks she may have said. She can't remember exactly, because of course at the time it seemed like nothing at all.

As for the deep currents, the Harrises had suspected for several months that something wasn't quite right. Dayne had had a bout of mononucleosis the year before and now seemed to be tired all the time. Dyan Harris asked her son, as gingerly as she could, whether he thought he might be depressed. Only crazy people are depressed, Dayne informed her. Even more gingerly she asked Dayne if he had ever tried drugs. No way, Dayne said.

A couple of months before his death, Harris took a different tack. On the pretense of a throat culture, she took Dayne to the doctor. While Dayne was in the examining room, Harris tracked down the doctor in the hall. Dayne sleeps a lot, she told him. And there's just something that doesn't look right. She hoped the doctor would broach the topic of depression with Dayne. Instead, the doctor asked Dayne if he used drugs. No, said Dayne.

Like many mothers, Dyan Harris is a worrier, a person who can take a small concern and turn it into a looming catastrophe. Now she wonders if she should have worried even more. This is what a suicide in the family will do to you: make you question everything you ever did as a parent.

Not long ago, Dyan Harris went to hear a lecture at the University of Utah. A doctor spoke about the biochemical nature of depression, about the way some people are predisposed to it the way others are to cancer. "My intellectual part can say, 'Yes, it's the same,' " says Harris. "But my heart part thinks: If I had only said, 'Dayne, why don't you stay home from work and we'll take in a movie.' "

Tina Larsen has run a suicide survivors support group for the past 17 years. "When your child chooses to do this, you go back to day one," she says. "When I first started the group, there were two mothers who said, 'If I had only potty trained them differently.' "

Once a month, Dyan and Jesse Harris, Diane and Don Olsen, and Cathy and Wally Larrabee get together for their own informal support group. Torry Olsen shot himself in July. In January 1998, Greg Larrabee threw himself in front of a train. Sometimes the parents of other teenagers who have killed themselves also attend.

They talk, always, about why. They talk about the way America has become more violent; about song lyrics that extol hopelessness; about how easy it is to get drugs if you're a Utah teenager.

When the Utah Youth Suicide Study released its Phase I findings last summer, the three families wrote a letter to the editor. The study's preliminary findings -- statistics culled from medical, juvenile justice, school and Division of Family Services records of recent teen suicides -- seem to suggest that most suicides are delinquents (65 percent have a record of involvement with the juvenile justice system; 32 percent had at least one felony charge). While the statistics may be true, the families wrote, they may give many parents a feeling of false security if their own children haven't had any run-ins with the law.

"Negative statistics may lead most families (we never thought it would happen to our family either) to feel that their son (or daughter) is out of harm's way," wrote the families.

Was Dayne experimenting with marijuana in an effort to feel better? Did the drugs make him more depressed? Was he low because of the lingering effects of the mononucleosis? In the middle of a family that loved him unconditionally, did he still feel like he didn't measure up? The Harrises have lots of questions and few answers. Dyan Harris wonders now if Dayne compared himself to his high-achieving older sister and his athletic brother. Maybe, Harris wonders, he thought he had to be perfect.

Maybe, says Tina Larsen, perfection is part of the answer. Maybe this is why Utah ranks so high in suicide rates among young men. Maybe, she says, because of LDS Church doctrines that preach abstinence, chastity and daily scripture reading, a young person who falls short feels especially like a failure.

The truth is likely much more complicated than that. At this point, the Utah Youth Suicide Study doesn't even have data yet on religious preferences of the state's suicide victims.

The Western states, in general, have higher suicide rates than other regions of the country (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah have especially high rates. On the other hand, Colorado, for some reason, doesn't). Epidemiologists aren't sure why.

Even when demographic factors are taken out of the equation (the higher numbers of non-Hispanic Caucasians in these states, for example, because non-Hispanic Caucasian men tend to commit suicide more than Hispanic men), the West still ranks higher, according to Alex Crosby, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control.

One theory about the West's high suicide rate, says Crosby, is that the West tends to be more rural and more isolated. But it turns out that that doesn't really explain the Utah phenomenon. In 1997, 78 percent of youth suicides in Utah took place in urban rather than rural areas. The Utah Youth Suicide Study is looking into whether Utah has families that move more often.

Do we have more drug use in Utah than in, say, Rhode Island? More depression? Less acknowledgment of depression? Fewer treatment options? Some people have speculated that the West's high suicide rates may be related to the greater availability of guns. But a check with the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins reveals that gun ownership is actually higher, per capita, in the South and Midwest.

The Utah Youth Suicide Study -- which won't be completed for at least another year -- may provide some of the pieces of the puzzle. In the meantime, other people are trying to do something to reach teenagers and their parents.

Keith Kikel, whose 18-year-old son Danny killed himself last spring, is forming a corporation to bring more attention to the causes of suicide. And earlier this month the parents of 16-year-old Eric Moerer, who killed himself in the summer of 1997, sponsored a lecture about suicide and gifted students. Mike and Tina Moerer expected a couple dozen people to show up but got so many -- more than 150 -- that they had to find a bigger room.

In Weber County, detective Earl Cherry -- who has investigated more suicides than he can remember -- spearheaded the making of a video that he hopes will help teenagers understand the finality of suicide and the impact it has on the people left behind.

You try to reach Dyan Harris, but she does not answer her phone. For three days straight she has turned her ringer off and gone back to bed in the middle of the day.

Sometimes it will be a song that undoes her. Maybe something by Bare Naked Ladies, her son Dayne's favorite group. Or just the grayness of a November day.

When you finally reach her and then drive to the Harris home in the Bountiful foothills, she has placed three of Dayne's photos on the dining room table. In one of the photos Dayne is standing next to his girlfriend, getting ready to go to the senior prom. Dayne is wearing a goofy red tuxedo and a bowtie and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses he doesn't really need.

Harris takes you to Dayne's room. His Eagle Scout uniform is hanging on the closet door. Since his death, his bed has accumulated new mementoes: his high school diploma, his first stuffed animal, his favorite blue sweatshirt. In the corner is a hat rack full of hats. Dayne loved hats.

Immediately after Dayne's death, the Harrises and their three remaining children would huddle together, moving from room to room as one grieving unit. Sometimes, weeks later, Dyan Harris would have to go lie outside on the deck, in the sun, just to keep from shivering. Since Dayne's death, she has gained 15 pounds. "A moment's comfort or distraction from a chocolate chip cookie is worth it," she says. Some days she will go to his room just to smell the scent of Dayne that still lingers there.

She is not looking for your sympathy. But if you happen to be a teenager, and you happen to be reading this, maybe, she says, you will stop and think about how sad a mother and father and sisters and brothers and grandparents and friends can feel.

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"I really believe in my heart of hearts that 99.9 percent of these kids wouldn't do it again if they understood the hole they made in their family.

"If only Dayne could have hung in there one more day," she says.

She wonders what he felt like on his way to the playhouse, carrying that gun. Did he have to talk himself into it, she wonders, the way a young man might have to give himself a pep talk before asking a new girl out on a date? These are the questions the Utah Youth Suicide Study will never be able to answer. A survivor can only know so much. And there are other limitations, too. Harris has yet to fill out the questionnaire sent to her. On good days, when she actually has the energy to do something, there are so many other pressing chores. On bad days the questionnaire seems to suck all the oxygen out of the room. There are enough reminders without it.

Jesse Harris has thought about burning the playhouse down. In the meantime, now that winter is here, you can see it through the leafless trees, waiting at the top of the hill.

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