Adam Bosch of the Times Herald-Record reports that Hurley resident Evan Stauble, who had been missing since July 1, was found dead on Sunday.
Kingston police were the last to see Evan Stauble, walking across the Route 9W bridge that connects Kingston to Port Ewen. He told police he was just out for a walk. After a few days passed, Guy Stauble began putting fliers up around Kingston and Port Ewen, hoping that someone, anyone, might see his boy.
Then, on Sunday, Guy Stauble decided to look around the bridge where his son was last seen. He found Evan’s body under the bridge, where he had apparently hanged himself from a chain-link fence.
It seems that the Times Herald-Record wrestled with whether to publish this information at all. Reporters are especially wary of reporting on suicides because of a documented "copycat effect" that follows graphic or dramatic news coverage of suicide, as Bosch notes.
That’s about all we’re going to say here. Suicide is the grayest of areas for journalists. How we cover them is so murky that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention puts out an entire guidebook on when and how journalists should cover suicide.
As a reporter and editor, I sympathize with the paper's reluctance. But that caution should always be weighed against other factors: the public need for information, and the likelihood that the news will be made public regardless of whether the newspaper reports it. (For instance, just a few days ago, a newly-launched Shandaken blog reported an apparent local suicide.)
In the case of Evan Stauble, whose disappearance was well-publicized, it seemed clear to me that the Times Herald-Record did the right thing in reporting his death. Since we posted a link to their story about the search for Stauble last week, hundreds of people have come to our website via Google searches on his name. In the last few days, many of those searches included words like "death" or "suicide," prompting us to wonder if our readers knew something we didn't. Alas, it seems some of them did -- and from this recent post on a crime-sleuthing forum, it seems that the news was beginning to percolate out via Internet back channels anyway.
The circumstances of Stauble's death also raise a question with clear importance to the public: Could Kingston's (admittedly small and overworked) police department have done more to find him?
One more thought. There have been several large-scale scientific studies of how media reports are related to "copycat" suicides. Here's a recent summary of the evidence from the Public Library of Science. In an age where the idea of top-down control of information is going the way of the dinosaur, it might be high time to take a closer look at where blogging and social media fit in.
