‘Something Extremely Bad Is Happening Here’

Matthew Shaer wrote a story for Esquire about one Arizona community's response to alarming teen suicide rates.

Marcus Wheeler lived in a sun-bleached trailer just outside of Tempe, Arizona, but for a long time, he told classmates his home was actually across the street, in an upscale apartment complex. Once the lie was exposed, no one blamed him. How could they? His friends had supportive families, tidy suburban lives. Marcus had neither. His estranged mother lived in the Philippines and hadn't spoken to her son in more than a decade, and his father was a long-haul trucker who thought his son would benefit from a crash course in independence. Marcus was eighteen and alone.

Or mostly alone: He had a girlfriend, friends, and the other runners on the Corona del Sol High School track team. One morning in early 2015, Wheeler arrived at school wearing a bright yellow shirt emblazoned with the logo of Central Arizona College, which had offered him an athletic scholarship. His smile was toothy and broad. Wes Jensen, a teammate of Wheeler's, could see how proud his friend was. But he also knew Marcus was going through some stuff. He'd confessed to Jensen that he'd recently come close to killing himself but that another friend had talked him out of it at the last minute. Jensen hadn't been sure how to respond. Marcus had promised that that part of his life was behind him, so Jensen had let the matter drop.