Students find suicide victim near stadium
Four students walking home from the Rice Village found a dead body outside Rice Stadium in the early morning of the day of Beer-Bike.
Rice University Police Chief Bill Taylor said the death was determined to be a suicide. The individual, who was not affiliated with Rice, jumped off the upper deck of the southeast corner of the stadium, Taylor said.
‘It’s coincidental that [the suicide] happened to be at Rice,’ Taylor said. ‘It wasn’t a Rice person — we just happened to be here and were used for the purpose.’
Lovett College junior James Townsend said he and three friends were walking past the stadium at about 2:10 a.m. April 2 when they found the body.
‘As we approached the area, there seemed to be a pile of trash or some ambiguous form,’ Townsend said. ‘As we got closer, we realized it was a human and most likely dead. … I was shocked. He definitely landed on his face. It was pretty disturbing and very unexpected.’ Townsend said they shook the body to make sure the individual was dead and then called RUPD, which arrived within three minutes.
Soon afterward, Rice Emergency Medical Services arrived and performed CPR on the body to ensure it could not be revived, Townsend said.
Townsend said the officers immediately moved him and his friends away from the body to question and counsel them about the incident.
RUPD officers secured the area by 2:30 a.m. and performed a crime scene investigation, Taylor said.
Taylor said RUPD contacted the Houston Police Department, but HPD’s investigators were busy, so Taylor called in several off-duty RUPD officers.
The medical examiner arrived at 4:30 a.m. and took the body to the morgue. At the time, the body could only be identified as a male aged between 25 and 40, Taylor said.
The medical examiner reported the next day that the individual was a resident of the Montrose area who had been diagnosed with manic depression and had a history of drug abuse, Taylor said.
Taylor said one of the stadium gates had been left open the night of the suicide. The gates are usually closed in the early evening by the athletics staff or RUPD, but one was left open that evening for an event in the stadium’s ‘R’ Room and was not closed afterward, he said. Taylor said he was unsure why the gate was left open, but he thought it was insignificant. ‘I don’t know that it would make a whole lot of difference,’ Taylor said. ‘If he wanted to get in, he would have found a way. … This is probably someone who had full intent of what he was going to do.’
Soon after the police arrived, the students were taken to the RUPD station, where officers called a professional counselor to speak to them on the phone, Townsend said.
Lovett Masters Carolyn and Bernard Aresu picked up the students from the station and took them back to their house, where they spoke for about an hour and a half.
Townsend said both the counselor and masters helped him handle the incident.
‘We talked about suicide in general, mortality — things like that,’ he said.
Townsend said it was surreal to see the Beer-Bike crowd, unaware of the suicide, at the spot of the incident later the same day.
‘One thing that surprises me — but that makes sense — is [that] the night before Beer-Bike on the path the entire campus walked over, only a few hours before, [the suicide occurred],’ he said.
Townsend said it has become less difficult to talk about the incident.
‘I had some vivid imagery when I woke up the next morning,’ he said. ‘The day after, it was hard to deal with, then the day after that it was not too hard, and since then it’s been pretty easy.’
RUPD Lieutenant Dianna Marshall said the investigation is almost complete. When the medical examiner submits the final paperwork, the case will be closed, she said.
‘There is no indication there was any kind of foul play,’ Marshall said. ‘These are standard tests the medical examiner does.’
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