Parents on mission to stop teen suicides

Bill Spencer / WXYZ Channel 7 Action News
July 24, 2006

On the very last day of his young life, Chase Edwards of Brighton, a strikingly handsome, athletic and artistically gifted 12-year-old, laughed hysterically at Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson in the slapstick cowboy flick "Shanghai Knights."

Right after the movie, he went to Borders to buy the anniversary edition of his favorite game, Scrabble. Less than three hours after that, Chase took his favorite Nike sweatshirt, and, tying it into a special kind of knot, hung himself in the shower in the upstairs bathroom.

In that moment, Chase not only took his own life, he altered the world of his parents, Jeff and Laura, forever.

"It has changed everything in my life from color to black and white," Laura says. "It's so much harder to find real joy now. Chase was my baby Chase was everything ... But now we have a new mission."

The mission that Jeff and Laura, successful real estate agents in Brighton, have undertaken is to bring the shadowlike specter of teen suicide, a subject that no one wants to talk about, out into the open in the hope of saving thousands of other young lives.

So Jeff and Laura gathered up their collective grief and decided to use it to fuel a grassroots campaign to educate parents and children about the early warning signs of youth depression and suicide.

Right away, they sought out and found the leading experts on youth suicide here in Michigan, and they started going to local schools to talk about the problem.

Statistics show that every 15 minutes, an American teenager will take his or her own life; in fact, suicide in now the third leading cause of death among teens and children ages 10 to 18 years old.

Still, the topic is not addressed enough, Jeff says.

"Because parents won't talk about it and teachers and school officials have traditionally been too terrified to talk about it, it becomes imperative that children have somewhere to go for information and help to deal with the tragedy of teen suicide," he says.

Jeff and Laura also spent countless hours lobbying Michigan lawmakers to pass a law that would encourage local schools to address the problem with "age-appropriate" information at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

Now, Gov. Jennifer Granholm has made House Bill 4375, forever to be known as "the Chase Edwards Law," a reality.

"It's a law that gives the green light to school officials to drag this once-taboo topic out of the shadows," Jeff says.

The bill, signed into law in Lansing on Thursday, strongly encourages all schools to hold classes for children on the warning signs of severe depression and where they can go for immediate help and counseling.

If you would like to know more about "the Chase Edwards Law," you can log onto www.wxyz.com or www.chaseedwardsmemorial .com.

The subject of teen suicide is something no one likes to talk about. For that reason, it's a problem young Chase dealt with all alone, all by himself, in the only way he knew how.

"We don't ever want to see another parent endure what Jeff and I have had to go through," Laura says. "All this silence is killing our children."

You can watch Bill Spencer and the "Call Bill For Action" Team at 5 p.m. Monday thru Friday on "WXYZ Channel 7 Action News."