The Violent Life and Sudden Death of Junior Seau

When the legendary NFL linebacker retired for good in 2010, he seemed set for life: supremely wealthy, beloved across the league, a hero in his hometown of San Diego. Two years later, he was dead. On a lonely morning in a big empty house, Seau shot himself through the chest. It's no longer a secret how much damage pro football can do to the men who play it, but never before had we witnessed it destroy a genuine superstar—not until Junior Seau. in this GQ special report, Seau's friends and former teammates try to make sense of how a life so filled with triumph could go so wrong so fast

The average NFL career lasts 3.5 years. Junior Seau, one of the greatest linebackers in the history of the NFL, played for twenty—and San Diego, where he starred most of those years for the Chargers, was his city as much as New York is Derek Jeter's. Seau invested in San Diego both as a businessman and as the head of a foundation serving at-risk kids. But after retiring as a very wealthy man in 2010—he earned more than $50 million over the course of his long career—he began to behave uncharacteristically.

NASA's Mars Rover Team: Spacemen of the Year 2012

NASA's Mars Rover Team: Spacemen of the Year 2012

Baker: Engineers don't believe in superstition. We believe in the laws of physics. But when it comes to things like this, you have a sense you'd better do what you've always done before.

Chen: You know the saying—"There are no atheists in a foxhole."

Baker: Late afternoon, things started happening. My Twitter feed started buzzing like mad. Then this radio show in Australia wants to interview me. That's when I realize the whole world is watching.

Chen: My job is to explain to the world what's going on. That was the first time anyone had ever put makeup on me. Not many people get to have their life's work play out before the whole world and also do the play-by-play of it. It was nerve-racking.

Devereaux: We see that people are watching in Times Square. There's a landing party at a bar in Seattle.

Chen: TV goes live with programming at eight thirty. The girl who named Curiosity is outside getting interviewed. There are sound checks. It's surreal.

Devereaux: My job was to be the fire extinguisher behind the glass. Hypothetically, something goes wrong, I'm expected to break the glass and leap into action. But really there was nothing I could do. There was nothing anyone in that room could do.

Steve Sell (war-room chief): We're just monitoring the data as it comes in. We've got engineers monitoring specific events, giving a thumbs-up if we're nominal. We make that call on the network and let Allen know.

Baker: A big milestone is forty minutes before atmosphere, a signal called EDL main. It's basically "Okay, no kidding, we're doing EDL now." I'm a snowboarder, so it's like you've gotten off the ski lift, you've edged over, and you're looking down that double black diamond.

Chen: Ten minutes before cruise-stage separation, Adam selects "All or Nothing at All" by Sinatra, plays it over the network.

Sell: There's a fourteen-minute speed-of-light delay. When we learn we're hitting the top of the atmosphere, in reality Curiosity has been sitting on the surface for seven minutes. Or she's dead. Either way, it was all over seven minutes ago.

Steltzner: But you don't live it that way. You're in the moment.

Chen: We separate from cruise and switch to an omnidirectional antenna. Our data stream slows significantly. We've suddenly got the speed of a dial-up modem, a blip of data every ten seconds.

Baker: If you want to make an engineer nervous, take away his data.

Chen: We watch the spacecraft turn off the fault-protection software. That keeps it from doing anything dangerous during cruise. It's about to start doing lots of dangerous things.

Sell: You can feel the anxiety level starting to rise.

Steltzner: I'm not sitting. I can't sit.

Devereaux: I'm seated next to the chief engineer, Rob Manning. He and Adam are pacers. The two of them are doing cycles around the room. They've got their own little orbits.

Davis: We had run millions of simulations. Now we had one chance to get it right.

Steltzner: When you get close to Mars, Mars starts sucking you in.

Baker: We hit the atmosphere doing 13,000 mph.

Chen: We pressurize the engines, start flying towards the target.

Baker: We've got eight rockets producing sixty pounds of thrust.

Chen: We're doing bank reversals, steering from left to right.

Baker: We're carving S's in the upper atmosphere.

Chen: In seventy seconds we hit our peak temperature, 1,300 degrees Celsius [2,372 Fahrenheit], and peak deceleration. The spacecraft is pulling twelve Earth g's.

Baker: For thirteen minutes we're getting this really low data rate, which means we're doing some critical things in the dark—cruise separation, de-spinning, pressurizing. Then boom! All our screens light up. We've got our data back. The Mars Odyssey satellite is now close enough to the spacecraft to give us a faster rate.

Baker: We do a maneuver called "straighten up and fly right" just before the parachute deploys. The parachute is going to yank us with 60,000 pounds of force.

Sengupta: Parachute deployment is particularly violent and chaotic.

Chen: We lose communication briefly when violent things happen to the spacecraft. Things are tense.

Sengupta: It's the largest parachute ever used on Mars, and it's deployed at the largest Mach number a parachute has ever been deployed, 950 mph, two times the speed of sound on Mars. It's unpredictable. It acts like a big jellyfish, collapsing and reinflating. It's just spewing everywhere.

Baker: We slow dramatically with the parachute.

Chen: The parachute deploys; the heat shield drops; our radar picks up the ground. We're nine kilometers up. You can hear some excitement in people's voices. But this is a place that has killed us in tests.

Baker: At back-shell separation, we sever the parachute, and the descent stage and rover fall out and free-fall for one second.

Chen: We activate the descent-stage thrusters. We do some pretty gnarly maneuvers to fly away from the back shell and parachute.

Baker: We're falling at 200 mph one minute before impact. The engines throttle up to slow us to 64 mph. I've never been more stressed-out.

Chen: Now we're hovering twenty meters above the surface, moving less than 2 mph.

Steltzner: I hear Al say, "Sky crane start." That was the part I was frankly most nervous about.

Davis: I'm the one who has to tell everyone that we've touched down, but you can't say, "Touchdown." There are two more confirmation steps after that.

Sell: You don't want Allen telling the world we've touched down when it's not confirmed. You don't want to fumble on the one-yard line.

Davis: So we came up with "Tango delta nominal." Only the core people knew what that meant.

Steltzner: I hear Jody say, "Tango delta nominal."

Davis: I want to scream it, but you have to remain cool and collected.

Steltzner: I'm like, "This could be pretty cool," but I'm still listening, listening...

Sell: There's an inertial sensor in Curiosity. When we learn that the rover is no longer moving, someone will say, "RIMU stable."

Steltzner: I hear, "RIMU stable..."

Sengupta: You've still got those high-velocity supersonic jets hovering twenty feet over the rover. You don't want that.

Baker: Curiosity tells the descent stage to fly away. Then it's got .7 seconds to fire pyrotechnic devices that cut the cables or it's going for a ride.

Davis: Everyone's bubbling with anticipation. I start this clock in the back of my head. We have to wait ten seconds after "RIMU stable" to make sure the fly-away has happened.

Baker: The descent stage flies 625 meters away and crashes into the surface going 100 mph.

Chen: Adam pokes me in the shoulder. I say, "Touchdown confirmed. We are safe on Mars."

Sell: The room erupts.

Steltzner: Almost immediately we get the thumbnail images. For me, that was it. That was the human existential proof that we did it.

Baker: [In the satellite photos] you could see this little plume. That was all my hardware and engines going up in a cloud of debris and vapor. Sometimes I think of someone finding that stuff one day, the stuff some nameless engineer spent eleven years of his life on. It would be like finding one of Columbus's ships.

Devereaux: The data is great, but you see pictures and you think, That is fucking Mars!

Davis: "Tango delta nominal" has become its own thing. I get tweets from people taking trips, and when their plane lands, they'll say, "Tango delta nominal Paris" or "Tango delta nominal L.A."

Devereaux: I walked around in a trance for a week.

Steltzner: So, um, it was a great night. Inspirational.

Men's shirts by Brooks Brothers. Ties by The Tie Bar

The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador

Last fall, one of Spain's greatest matadors took a horn to the face. It was a brutal goring, among the most horrific in the history of bullfighting. Miraculously, Juan Jose Padilla was back in the bullring—sí, fighting bulls — a mere five months later. And in the process of losing half his sight, he somehow managed to double his vision

I. Zaragoza, Spain—October 7, 2011

What does the bull see as it charges the matador? What does the bull feel? This is an ancient mystery, but it seems like a safe bet that to this bull, Marques—ashy black, 5 years old, 1,100 pounds—the bullfighter is just a moving target, a shadow to catch and penetrate and rip apart. Not a man with a history, not Juan Jose Padilla, the Cyclone of Jerez, 38 years old, father of two, one of Spain's top matadors, taking on his last bull of the afternoon here at the Feria del Pilar, a hugely anticipated date on the bullfighting calendar.

When Marques comes galloping across the sand at Padilla, the bullfighter also begins to run—not away from the animal but toward its horns. Padilla is luminously scaled in fuchsia and gold, his "suit of lights." He lifts his arms high above his head, like a viper preparing to strike. For fangs, he has two wooden sticks with harpoonlike barbs, two banderillas, old technologies for turning a bull's confusion into rage. Padilla and Marques are alone in the sandy pit, but a carousel of faces swirls around them. A thousand eyes beat down on Padilla, causing sweat to bead on his neck. Just before Marques can gore him, he jumps up and jabs the sticks into the bull's furry shoulder. He brings down both sticks at once, an outrageous risk. Then he spins around so that he is facing Marques, running backward on the sand, toe to heel.

A glancing blow from Marques unsteadies Padilla; his feet get tangled. At the apex of his fall, he still has time to right himself, escape the bull. His chin tilts up: There is the wheeling sky, all blue. His last-ever binocular view. This milestone whistles past him, the whole sky flooding through the bracket of the bull's horns, and now he's lost it. The sun flickers on and off. My balance—

Padilla has the bad luck, the terrible luck, of landing on his side. And now his luck gets worse.
Marques scoops his head toward Padilla's face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he's leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter's jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla's skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador's cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy.

Then Padilla's prone body is left in the bull's dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying. I can't breathe. I can't see.

Marques, meanwhile, has trotted a little ways down the sand. He stands there panting softly. His four legs are perfectly still. What unfolds is a scene that Beckett and Hemingway and Stephen King might have collaborated to produce, because this is real horror, the blackest gallows humor: the contrast between the bullfighter crying out "Oh, my eye! I can't see! I can't see!" and the cud-chewing obliviousness of the animal.

In the bullring, other bullfighters spill onto the sand and rush to Padilla's aid. They lift him, hustle him toward the infirmary. Meanwhile, the bullfight must go on. Miguel Abellan, another matador on the bill, steps in for Padilla. He kills Marques in a trance-like state that he later swears he can't remember. Tears run down his cheeks. He's survived twenty-seven gorings himself, but what he sees in Zaragoza makes him consider quitting the profession.

Cornadas—gorings—are so common that every plaza is legally required to have a surgeon on site. Bullfighters now routinely survive injuries that would have killed their fathers and grandfathers. Good luck, now, excellent luck: Carlos Val-Carreres is the Zaragoza surgeon, one of the best in Spain.

"I'm asphyxiating," Padilla gasps as they bring him in. Many hands guide him into the shadowy infirmary. Someone scissors off his clothing. Someone inserts a breathing tube into his windpipe. Val-Carreres understands instantly that this is a potentially fatal cornada, one of the worst he's seen in thirty years, and one they are ill-equipped to handle in the infirmary. Padilla, now tracheally intubated, is loaded into an ambulance.

Pronóstico muy grave, Val-Carreres tells reporters.

At 7:52 p.m., half an hour after the goring, Padilla arrives at the emergency room. He presents with multiple fractures to the left side of his face, a detached ear, a protruding eyeball, and hemorrhage at the base of his skull. A five-hour operation saves his life. The surgeons rebuild his cheekbone and eyelid and nose, with mesh and titanium plates. But they are unable to repair his split facial nerve, which has been divided by the bull's horn, because they cannot locate the base of the nerve. Padilla wakes up from the anesthesia to discover that he can no longer move the left side of his face. It is paralyzed.

When he comes to, his first words to his manager, Diego Robles, are: "Don't cancel any of my contracts in South America." Padilla has November bullfights in Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador.

His first words to his youngest brother, Jaime, who is also a bullfighter, a banderillero, and scheduled to perform in two days' time: "Don't cancel your fight. You have to do it for us. You can't let this get the best of you."

His first words to his wife, Lidia: "Where is my eye?"

The eye is back in its proper place, but sightless—the optic nerve has been elongated and lesioned by the horn. He's also deaf in his left ear, and the entire left side of his face is purple and bloated, like something viewed underwater. His eyelid is sealed shut. His mouth curls inward like a wilted leaf.

Torero:
Any bullfighter. An umbrella term that includes matadors, banderilleros (the "flagmen" who put in the barbed sticks), and picadors (the lancers on horseback).

La fiesta brava:
Many Spaniards take exception to the English translation of la fiesta, also known as la corrida de toros, as "the bullfight" and torero as "the bullfighter." The bullfight is a rigidly ordered art form, they insist, not a "fight" or a sport, and the bullfighter is an artist.

Cuadrilla:
The matador's supporting cast, consisting of two banderilleros, two picadors, and a mozo de espada (the "sword page").

Toros bravos:
The Spanish fighting bull, a breed descended from the bloodlines of ancient Iberian cattle, whose savagery has been cultivated for centuries by dynastic ganaderos, or bull ranchers. Designer bulls from prestigious ranches can cost as much as 12,000 euros.

Cojones:
Balls. Often invoked as a literal metric for a torero's valor, as in "Son of a whore, that bull just grazed El Juli's cojones!" Terrifying fact: The toreros in Padilla's cuadrilla do not wear jock protection.

Evacuating While Black

The small rebel checkpoint building on the highway between Ajdabiya and Brega is shaking. The shack's small hallway, only a few feet wide, is crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with shouting men carrying RPGs, pistols and machine guns. Six black men are pushed single-file through the frenzied throng. Everyone jostles to touch them, ripping off the men's baseball caps and beenies and throwing them on the floor. The men are shoved into a small adjoining room.

At the sight of two journalists the crowded hallway erupts: "These are mercenaries!" the rebels proclaim with rage-tinged pride.

Minutes later the black men are marched out of the checkpoint and piled back into their hired red van. Young rebels who have commandeered the vehicle hang out the open doors, flashing "V" for victory to their compatriots, as they cart the men away. A lone rebel standing on the highway lets loose a few rounds from his AK-47 in celebration.

Everyday eastern Libyan rebels and Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces clash in an ever-shifting front line of control for the country. Everyday the death toll to remove Qaddafi climbs. The rebels are impatient; they thought the fight for Tripoli would be over by now. But the ragtag liberation army takes solace in one thing: Everyone believes the bulk of Qaddafi's military might comes from African mercenaries.

The paid troops are believed to be imported from places like Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Mali, and Sudan. And although it's impossible to confirm any of this (there's no access to Qaddafi's roster) the rumor has had severe unintended consequences—now every dark skinned man in Libya is suspect.

"These are mercenaries, you see!" The men at the checkpoint insisted. When I asked how they could be sure, one man responded: "By the smell." He explained that these men dropped their weapons in the desert and scattered, and that now they were only pretending to be migrants. The rebels caught them because they smell like they haven't showered for days: mercenaries.

Many migrants don't carry paperwork, but even those who say they have shown the rebels their work visas have been targeted and taken from their homes in the middle of the night. One of the places they are brought is the courthouse in Benghazi, where they are being held in a makeshift detention center on the fourth floor.

In the first few days after Benghazi fell to rebel control, the command center was adamant that the Africans in their care were mercenaries. But when Human Rights Watch and visiting journalists questioned this, the rebels shut down access, begrudgingly allowing me in only after a long argument and the promise that I would not publish any of the Africans' names.

Upstairs, six men are shuffled into an empty office. They are from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Ghana. They appear calm, deferring to a man from Ghana who speaks perfect English. He says they were taken from their homes in Benghazi in a night raid. "People with guns came to search our house, they beat us and brought us in," he tells me. "We don't know anything about mercenaries. We spent the past four years working for a company."

The guards shout over him: Fine, if you're not a mercenary you're an illegal immigrant.

"I'm not!" the man responds, "I paid 400 dinar for a visa!"

The rebels change their story again. Now they say they are keeping the men for their own protection. "If you go outside now, people may kill you, you're here to keep your life," one of the rebel guards says.

As one of the first groups to be apprehended, these men were used as an example of the rebels' victory over Qaddafi's mercenaries. Their pictures were flashed on BBC and Al Jazeera Arabic. The rebels took pictures of them with their phones, which have also made the rounds. There's no way they can stay in Libya now.

"Tell my wife!" another man shouts to me, "Tell my family! We need our embassy! We need help!" "Enough," one of the rebel administrators, a woman, says. The men are escorted out.

The woman assures me that their claims will be investigated and that if the men are found innocent they will be released. When I return a week later I am told that the men have been let go. She points me to another woman, Karima Mousa Idris, a lawyer in charge of the detainees.

"We ask about their nationality, since when they've been in Libya, exactly where they were arrested, where he worked, whether he is employed, unemployed, show us your cards or passports. Some don't have passport, then we ask about their working contracts," Idris explains.

"We have to take time to question them. If they got released it's our responsibility, we don't want to be unfair and convict them on false charges. We also worry about their safety," she says.

Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, confirms Idris's claim. "The problem is not the authorities, but the general population," he says. "The problem is many Libyans now consider any Africans in Libya to be mercenaries."

Bouckaert recently visited the courthouse detention center and says that, aside from the overcrowding, the detained Africans are treated well. But that's just inside.

Outside is a different story as African men continue to be rounded up by the civilian-rebels, all of whom seem to be carrying weapons, and are brought into 'official' holding chambers for questioning. Once they are investigated and released, Idris explains, it's up to them to brave the evacuation route out of Libya.

Sarah A. Topol is a Cairo-based journalist. She has reported from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, Libya, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, Newsweek, and Slate, among others

The Boy from Gitmo

This is a story about lost and broken things, the rubble from which the phoenix-in this case a C-130 military transport-rises over the Caribbean Sea on a spotless day in September 2008. From 30,000 feet, the surface of the water glitters below like jagged glass, shooting spears of light. The plane stalks east, running parallel to the northern coast of Cuba twenty miles off. On board, Major Eric Montalvo is wedged in a seat, thinking, What the fuck have I gotten myself into now?

A month ago, he'd been working at Parris Island, South Carolina, capping a distinguished career during which he'd won more than 95 percent of his cases. He'd recently bought a big house with a huge kitchen and a fountain out back for his wife and two boys-and had begun to turn his attention to finding a civilian job. And then an e-mail pinged his in-box. Copied to a couple of hundred Marine lawyers, it called for applications to help with the military commissions trials at Guantánamo. Montalvo responded impulsively, stirred by the call to duty. Within a couple of hours, he received word. His retirement had been pulled: He was going to Washington, D.C.

The timing was terrible. The real estate market was imploding, the house couldn't be sold, and Montalvo was forced to leave his family for an indeterminate amount of time. Still, there was worse to come. When he found out he'd been placed on the defense side-when he realized that he'd actually be defending the terrorists-he was stricken. The phone started ringing, colonels he knew on the line repeating the same mantra: "This isn't going to be good for your career, Major." Then the call with his parents. On September 11, Montalvo's uncle Tony had responded with his Harlem fire company to Ground Zero, and Montalvo's parents believed it was black lung that killed him not long after.

Please don't do this, Montalvo's mother told him.

Now the transport sweeps wide around Cuba's eastern tip, an arid land of organ-pipe cacti and big loping rodents called banana rats. Below is Guantánamo Bay itself (a flume of blue water mushrooming inland, teeming with turtles and parrot fish) and then the naval base, a scattering of roads, buildings, and low-slung homes that accommodate the 6,000 troops here. Montalvo's first impression is how foreboding the rocky shoreline seems, how moonlike the landscape. A Caribbean Alcatraz. Somewhere down there, too, are the cages that contain "the worst of the worst"-as Donald Rumsfeld labeled them-alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. Montalvo's stomach burns a little with the thought that he might have to collude with any of them, in any manner. A self-described superpatriot and son of blue-collar parents (mother a hairdresser, father a cargo man for AeroMexico), he grew up in Queens, a skinny Puerto Rican scrapper, then joined the Marines at 18 and morphed into "Mad Dog," his gonzo jarhead persona. Soon he was touted for Officer Candidates School and afterward went on to law school at Temple, emerging with gravitas as this slightly fattened-up (five feet nine, 220 pounds) lawyer of laser logic and indignant rage, trimmed beard flecked gray, and bad attorney's back.

When he first found out he'd been assigned to the defense side, he went and spoke to Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the commissions at the time, and the colonel asked Montalvo if he thought he could handle it. The job would get very personal, he said, but it was also the most meaningful kind of work because it was all about the Constitution. And this is how Montalvo buttressed himself in the face of so many doubters, repeating it back to them. "If I'm going to fight the fight for America," he'd say, "dead center on the Constitution is where I want to be."

He soon finds himself on the top step of the military commissions building, gazing down on a makeshift tent city and sweating through his cammies in the heat. He's been assigned the separate cases of two detainees, and enters a small interrogation room where the first, a Yemeni named Ali al-Bahlul, is chained and shackled to the floor. The detainee is surprisingly lithe, a handsome man with close-cropped hair who speaks impeccable English. He's one of Osama bin Laden's former media operatives, most famous for having made a two-hour video celebrating Al Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole. It's one of the jihad movement's all-time greatest hits, and al-Bahlul is also among the most doctrinaire, having been locked away in solitary for years. As they sit face-to-face, al-Bahlul asks why the Marine is trying to be so accommodating. "Don't you know I'm your enemy?" he says. Montalvo responds that, legally speaking, he feels that a First Amendment argument can be made on his behalf, but al-Bahlul interrupts, jangling his chains. "Don't you know that if that door were opened and we both were out there free, I'd kill you?" Nothing has prepared Montalvo for this kind of venom, but his reaction is visceral. He leans forward and says, "Don't you know that if that door were open and we both were free, I'd kill you first?" When it's over, Montalvo leaves the room shell-shocked, thinking, Jesus, how can I defend that?

It's not just al-Bahlul. He feels it all around: that what's really being played out here is a clash of civilizations. Even the setting, the harsh sun and roiling ocean, evokes a desolation, the sense that in this otherworld there's been an allowance made for some unsayable human brutality. Eye for an eye. Montalvo goes back to his tent, gets some grub, sleeps in double sleeping bags because the air-conditioning blows an arctic frost all night. The next day he's introduced to his second client, Internal Security Number 900. The detainee is said to have committed an attack against two Special Forces soldiers in a marketplace in downtown Kabul, a brazen assault with a grenade that left the soldiers badly maimed but alive.

Are You Sure You Want To Quit The World?

If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she'd promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn't. Turned out, Li Dao was something even more sinister than anyone thought

Update, March 16, 2011:

Back in October, GQ correspondent Nadya Labi took us into the shadowy cyber-world of "Li Dao," a seemingly sweet nurse doling out advice in suicide chat rooms on how to best end one's life. With the investigative sleuthing of a few people from all over the world, that nurse—who turned out to be a middle-aged man named William Melchert-Dinkel—was charged with assisting in two suicides. Yesterday, a Minnesota judge found Melchert-Dinkel guilty on two counts of assisting the suicides of 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji and 32-year-old Mark Drybrough.

---

"Check Your E-mail"

The three innocuous words seemed to offer Mark Drybrough the relief he sought. At 32, Mark was beyond tired. Life had long ceased to be the fun it once was. He had been a mischievous kid, an outgoing teenager who would make classmates laugh, leaping the school fence to freedom. At college in Coventry, England, he started out in high spirits, studying computer engineering and finding a girlfriend.

But after a year, the girl came down with a viral infection and then Mark did, and he never really recovered. Though he wasn't formally diagnosed, he felt certain that he'd developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Whatever he had—whether it was in his body or his mind—he couldn't summon the energy to get out of bed. Eventually he got dumped, stopped attending classes, and dropped out altogether.

For the next decade, Mark struggled to find the laughs. He lived in a small house in Coventry that his great-uncle had left him, but he couldn't maintain a job. He battled depression, going through dark periods when he refused to take medication, and he suffered psychotic fits. His mother, Elaine, paid his bills. He had no money, no car, no social life. He knew he was a disappointment—most of all to himself.

In July 2005, under the handle "spooky," Mark posted a request on the Web site alt.suicide.methods: "Does anyone have details of hanging methods where there isn't access to anything high up to tie the rope to. I've read that people have taken their own lives in jail, anybody know of inventive methods, the ones you don't get to read in the paper."

Li Dao knew. She directed Mark to check his e-mail. When he opened her message, he found guidance. She wrote, "Depending on how tall you are, preferable under 6 ft. tal [sic], you can easily from a door using the knob on [the other] side to tie the rope to, sling it over the top of the door, attach the noose or loop to yourself then step off and hang successfully..."

A few weeks later, Mark's older sister, Carol, drove down from Leeds to visit the family. At dinner Carol arranged to meet her brother at a nearby park the next day. They confirmed the plan the following morning, but by four that afternoon he had still not turned up.

Carol drove to her brother's home and knocked on the door. No answer. She let herself in and found a note on the inside door in block letters: Please call the police. Do not go upstairs, go home, hand this note to the police.

Carol rushed upstairs anyway, but the bedroom door was blocked. She forced her way in and found her brother hanging from a white nylon rope attached to a ladder propped by the door. She tried to hold him up, hoping to save him, and immediately called for help. She stood there supporting his weight while she waited for the paramedics, but they would soon pronounce him dead.

Shortly after, Carol returned to her brother's room and logged on to his computer. She learned that he'd spent a significant amount of time in suicide chat rooms, researching an effective way to kill himself. She also discovered that he'd entered into a suicide pact with a nurse named Li Dao. In fact, the nurse had sent her brother a note the day he died.

Her e-mail was brief: "Are you alright, Mark? Li"

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Suicide chat rooms can save lives. The very act of logging on to a site like alt.suicide.methods (ASM) or alt.suicide.holiday (ASH) offers a potentially suicidal person the chance of finding support, redemption, or relief from the loneliness that led him there in the first place. Or logging on could be the first step a suicidal person takes to find the expertise, the courage, even the companionship, to go through with it. These chat rooms can provide a lifeline, or they can amount to a death sentence. It all depends on who's online and what they're doing there.

ASH began as a Google discussion group about why suicide rates increase over the holidays, then grew to become a regular destination; ASM bills itself, unapologetically, as "discussions about how to do yourself in." Members consider themselves pro-choice (choice being the right to suicide), and the forums host a range of people—not just those intent on committing suicide. Many do go there specifically to gather information on surefire ways to "catch the bus," or CTB, as suicide is known. But others may be recovering from a previous attempt or feeling down and looking for support among the like-minded. Still others may be there to offer a connection to those in need. Suicide is, for the most part, a solitary act; the majority of the 35,000 or so individuals who kill themselves in the United States every year are isolated and withdrawn from society. Simply accessing a world outside their own heads, as they do on ASH or ASM, might improve their chances of survival.

Mostly, members are supportive of one another, querying those who declare their intention to CTB to make sure they've explored other alternatives. But chat rooms are also places where a person can forge a connection that makes it easier to take that final ride. Some even form suicide pacts, promising to kill themselves at an appointed time, either virtually or in person. Who knows just how many follow through? But it does happen.

"I Heard the Shots and Ran Toward the Sound

That's Daniel Hernandez talking, the 21-year-old intern who helped save Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords's life. Here, Hernandez and two other heroes of the Arizona massacre—one of the men who tackled the gunman and the woman who prevented him from reloading—tell Amy Wallace their gripping stories of that dark and sunny Saturday

Daniel Hernandez Jr. (21, junior at the University of Arizona, intern for Representative Giffords): I had thought I wanted to be a physician. Then I volunteered for Hillary Clinton's campaign. I've always been drawn to strong women. They face a double standard, and it's always been a lot harder for them to get half as far, even though they're working twice as hard. The day after Hillary lost the primary, I met Gabby. She had been the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona state senate. I had an interaction with her at an event, and she just left the biggest impression. After that, my plans changed. It wasn't that I didn't like medicine. I just thought I would be able to serve more people if I went into public service.

My internship was supposed to start on January 12, when school begins, but I'd volunteered to start early, because between semesters the office is short-staffed. I've known Gabby for years—I'd worked on her campaigns since I met her in June 2008. She's the kindest, warmest individual you will ever meet. "I don't do handshakes, honey. I do hugs," she always says.

Patricia Maisch (61, co-owner with her husband, John, of Oro Valley Heating & Cooling): I was there to thank Gabrielle for her work over the last several years. So much is reported about how the stimulus package didn't work, but for our small business, it was incredible. There was a $1,500 federal tax credit if you upgraded your heating-and-cooling system, and we had our best year ever in 2009. I went there to tell her I hoped she would run again in 2012.

Bill Badger (74, retired army colonel): I'd never met her, but the congresswoman and I had communicated back and forth on e-mail. Her husband is a captain in the navy, which is equivalent to a colonel in the army. So she's a military spouse, and my wife is a military spouse. Obamacare was one of the issues I e-mailed her about, especially military medical benefits for life. She was exceptionally good at responding. If I had a question, she'd get me an answer. I'm a Republican and she's a Democrat, but she works all the way from the right to the left. I truly admire her.

Hernandez: I had gotten up at seven forty-five that day, like I usually do. Gabe Zimmerman, Gabby's community-outreach director, had organized the 10 a.m. "Congress on Your Corner" event, and he asked me to be at the Safeway at the corner of Ina and North Oracle by 9 a.m. to help with setup. When people started arriving, I went to the back of the line with my clipboard, taking down people's information so if we ran out of time, we could send them a letter acknowledging them for coming. That generally didn't happen, because if there was a crowd, Gabby would rarely leave, even if she was late to the next event. But just to be on the safe side, I was registering people.

Maisch: I got there early, and I signed in with Daniel—I know that's his name now. I was fourth or fifth in line. I asked him, "Are we going to go in order?" and he said yes. I told him I'd be right back and went into the grocery store and bought a banana and a bottle of water and came back out. Now there are twenty to twenty-five people there. I could have pushed back up to the front, but I thought, you know, "I'm not going to be pushy. I'm just going to go to the end of the line. It's a beautiful day. I can stand in the sun."

Badger: When I got there, Giffords had a big banner up with her name on it. I just walked right up and got about ten feet from her, and an aide stepped up and said I had to get in line. So I walked down to the end and registered. It was less than five minutes from the time I parked my car to when I heard the shooting: bang, bang, bang, bang.

Hernandez: I had just checked in Bill Badger when I heard what I thought was gunfire. For about half a second, I'm like, "Oh, maybe it's fireworks." And then I heard someone say "Gun!" and it clicked: I remembered some of the things that had happened over the last several months. There was a campaign event where an angry constituent had brought a gun but dropped it. And then the door of her congressional office in Tucson was shot at or smashed last March, after the vote on health care.

So I hear the shots, and the first thing I think of is Gabby. Making sure she's okay. I was about thirty to forty feet away from the congresswoman. I heard the shots and ran toward the sound.

Maisch: It didn't sound like a car backfiring. It didn't sound like a balloon popping. It had that horrible sound of gunfire. There was this momentary pause, and then it started again in earnest—you know, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I thought, "What should I do?" My thought was to run, but in that split second, the gunman was already there, and I thought, "If I run, I'm in his line of fire. He's going to turn from there and shoot at me. I'm going to be a target."

Badger: My first reaction was somebody had thrown a pack of firecrackers up where Giffords was talking with the people, just to harass her. But when I turned to look in that direction, I could see an individual shooting. I could see the man standing there with his arm out. He didn't move at first. All he did was turn where he was standing. And he started shooting the people sitting in folding chairs that the campaign had put out for people waiting in line. I knew that soon he was going to be shooting at me. The people on the chairs were hitting the ground. I turned to my left and started to crouch down. When I did, I felt this burning, stinging sensation on the back of my head. I dropped to the ground, and the shooting stopped. Then I stood up, and I was a little bit dazed, because I didn't realize the shooter was walking by right in front of me.