There was a pedestrian sidewalk, and beside it, a three-foot, two-inch-tall guardrail. There was no fence on the part of the bridge he’d reached. What led him there would always be a mystery to Marisa’s family, even after police and prosecutors came to their conclusions. She’d be joining the field at a time when the number of children hospitalized for thinking of or trying to kill themselves has more than doubled in the past decade, even for kids under the age of 14.
She had a plan: earn her master’s degree in clinical mental-health counseling and become a child psychologist. Marisa, 22, was on her way to spend another evening with Perry, watching Season 2 of “Stranger Things” and studying. He lived in a cramped Fairfax County apartment just a 15-minute walk from the Cedar Lane overpass. He was in seventh grade, in a building with nearly 1,000 students, where for the first time he had a short blue locker he had to find between classes and more homework than ever before. It was a day off for the boy on the bridge, too, but from Thoreau Middle School. She was in graduate school, and he was working at a nonprofit organization for veterans. It was October 2017, their first fall since graduating from college. Traffic heading east on Interstate 66, as seen from the spot where the boy jumped off the Cedar Lane overpass.